Fake Fruit Desserts Find Another Home in Manhattan

In the world of the children’s book author and illustrator Richard Scarry, characters can drive banana- and apple-shaped cars. It’s the first thing I think about when stopping by Salswee, a new bakery in Flatiron, which sells trompe l’oeil pastries in the shape of mangoes, bananas, and pears waiting in a showcase like fruit-shaped vehicles at a marble-clad luxury dealership.

The French Asian bakery, opened earlier this month at 180 Fifth Avenue, near West 23rd Street, serving cakes and other pastries, plus espresso drinks. It comes from an owner of Shakalaka Bakery, a Chinese bakery on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, Queens, according to a Salswee spokesperson. In Queens, the bakery is more casual with its hot dog rolls.

Fake fruit desserts like theirs are the kind that was once more typical to see in the dining room of a Midtown fine dining restaurant like Le Bernardin: The “‘apple’ arrives at the table looking like a perfect McIntosh just plucked from an upstate orchard. Cut into it, though, and you find a wall of brown-butter mousse surrounding a core of armagnac sabayon and apple roasted with caramel,” Grub Street wrote of the sculptural dessert in 2019. Chefs, like Cédric Grolet, in Paris, have long made the trompe l’oeil their calling card.

Emma Orlow/Eater NY

They are laborious to make; their rewards, no doubt fruitful — necessary in an era in which a dessert needs to do more than just serve as sweet finish to a meal. And more pertinent as restaurants reported cutbacks in pastry chefs.

That hasn’t stopped luxury bakeries from doubling down on desserts that can pass as sculptures. At Salswee, they are priced as such: On a recent visit, the banana-shaped dessert with a banana mousse inside was listed for around $10. To eat it is a race against the clock, as it smoothly melts into a spoon, not at all like the slow chew of an actual banana.

Fake produce desserts is one of many pastry chef tricks that rise and fall out of favor. More recently, they’ve once again gained notoriety at Eunji Lee’s Korean and French bakery Lysée, where the corn cake is the star. A similar version cropped up at Konban, a sit-down katsu spot in Chelsea. But the version at Salswee most resembles the bruised banana Lee served at Jungsik, the Korean fine dining restaurant.

We’re years past the days of “is it cake” videos flooding TikTok and even inspiring a reality show of the same name. “The hyper-realistic cake craze is now part of the pantheon of illogical internet food jokes,” the New York Times reported in 2020. Fake fruit desserts for spring/ summer ‘24 may not be groundbreaking any longer, if they ever were.

But the hope is, like with anything fake, it’s at least an approximation of the real thing and taste still has to be important.

Their staying power seems to speak not to any remedy of a meme, but rather a signaling of the ways bakeries are changing in New York — finding ways to imbue little luxuries into the everyday, as they become more high-end dessert parlors, to sit and stay awhile, than just a place to grab a pastry before hopping on the subway to work. No matter how many times the classic technique is replayed, it’s always fun. And the results may leave customers saying orange you glad it is a banana.