The sweet (and savory) taste of freedom.

"Don't taste that," Jordan Kahn warned, pointing to his pear-and-mushroom dessert. "It's not seasoned properly." It's an unremarkable thing to hear from a chef, but coming from a pastry chef, it's enough to give one more than the pause he intends. Even among his more experimental ccolleagues, the 23-year-old kahn manages to be truly unique.

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Thanks to his Cuban grandmother and her weekly feasts, Kahn got a very early hint of what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Things didn't come sharply into focus until his fourteenth year, when his mother unwittingly gave him what was to become his personal bible: The French Laundry Cookbook. On that Christmas Day, Kahn was introduced to the most important figure in his young culinary life.

Ultimately, Kahn's tale is one of Keller-worship. The French Laundry Cookbook replaced all his other high school texts, earning the wrath of his teachers even as they sought his advice for the evening's meal. Eager to get his career started, the fifteen-year-old Kahn began working at what was considered the best restaurant in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia. After immersing himself in Keller's world in print, he found the establishment underwhelming: "It's like saying 'I played pro basketball for North Korea." Still, it offered some valuable experience. In a short time, he went from grade manger to the hot line, where he was put in charge of one dinner and two lunch services a week. "I was manning a twelve-burner stove and all this stuff-completely ridiculous. I had no idea what I was doing," he laughs.

With his sights set on Yountville, Kahn graduated high school and, three days later, began his culinary education at Johnson & Wales in Charleston, South Carolina. He entered an accelerated program and completed a two-year associate's degree in just six months, an abbreviation he never regretted. "You think you're going to a school where everyone else is going to be like you, and it's not," he explains. "You're like you, and maybe there's a small handful of other people who are, but everybody else is just there for the ride and they don't really care." While in school, however, he got a solid foundation in pastry at the Charleston Grill, where he worked under Certified Master Pastry Chef Vinzenz Aschbacher.

During his time in Charleston, he focused on getting a position at the French Laundry even though he had faint hope. As a high school graduation present, his mother had taken him there for dinner, where, upon meeting Keller, an awestruck Kahn was rendered incapable of normal speech. "I couldn't talk, or something--I kept slurring my words. I left and said, 'Man, I sounded like an idiot. He's absolutely never going to hire me.'" Relying instead on the written word, Kahn crafted a five-page letter that more eloquently conveyed his admiration. Keller's assistant responded with an offer of a three-month stage. Kahn packed his things and headed for Napa. While the reality was surprisingly as good as the fantasy, settling into Keller's kitchen took sometime. "It's sort of a sharks' tank, because they're all razar-sharp cooks and they're all expecting everybody to be like them," he recalls. "Obviously I wasn't, but I had the heart." Once he became acclimated, it took only a single moment for him to understand how far he had already come. One day, at Keller's request, Kahn went out to the restaurant's farm to gather figs. Dressed for cooking, not climbing, he gamely scaled a tree in his clogs. There, twenty-five feet off the ground, it hit him. "This is epiphanal: I'm reaching to get a fig for Thomas Keller. Sick."

After his stage, he stayed on to take a position in pastry under Sebastien Rouxel. "He was my mentor, 100%," he says. When Rouxel went to New York two years later to open Per Se, Kahn went with him as his third-in-command after pastry sous chef Richard Capizzi. There Kahn began developing his own style, testing more unusual ideas with the same care and regard he had learned at the French Laundry Soon enough he realized that, in spite of being Keller's "own little Heston Blumenthal," he nevertheless couldn't convince Keller to approve of things like red peppers and eggplant in pastry. When Rouxel went on to become the executive pastry chef for all of Keller's properties and Capizzi went to Bouchon Bakery, Kahn turned down the opportunity to become Per Se's head pastry chef.

Instead, Kahn, went to Chicago to work with Alex Stupak at Alinea. Professionally, the move was just what he needed. "I went from a restaurant with a lot of parameters to a restaurant with no parameters, which was really great," he explains. He and Stupak were, in Kahn's estimation, "the exact same person," and together they developed more than 20 techniques that hadn't yet been done, at least at Alinea. When Stupak went to WD-50 in 2006, Kahn was again in line to become head pastry chef. Instead he decided Chicago wasn't where he was destined to stay, and returned to New York.

For a month, Kahn pondered his next move. When he saw that Varietal was looking for someone with a gift for unusual pastry, he knew he had found a place where he would be able to give his vision full expression. He took the position and helped get the restaurant together for its December 2006 opening.

So far he's winning converts by approaching his ingredients thoughtfully, a skill he learned from Rouxel. "I think what happens a lot of times when chefs do modern, avant-garde pastries is they don't taste good," he explains. "It's like, 'Yeah, so there's beet in the chocolate, but I'd rather have it without the beet."" With his own flavor combinations, Kahn seeks to elicit more than a politely murmured, "That's interesting." He wants to hear genuine amazement followed by a request for more.

*Kahn left Varietal in March 2007 and has relocated to San Francisco.

JORDAN KAHN Pastry Chef varietal, NYC