Meet a culinary artist of the first order

Max Jacobson

Wednesday, March 8, 2000 | 9:03 a.m.

Soft-spoken Hawaiian Stanton Ho is this city's Michaelangelo of spun sugar, our Rodin of molded chocolate.

Ho is first and foremost executive pastry chef at the Las Vegas Hilton. He's been at the hotel since 1979 and his long tenure makes him dean of Las Vegas pastry chefs.

In reality, though, he's a lot more than that. Yes, Ho heads the hotel bakery, where he manages a staff of 26 full-time bakers and oversees bread and pastry production for the hotel's 12 restaurants.

But he is also a decorated chef in his own right, having won medals in the prestigious Grand Prix of Chocolate competition, and as a member of Team U.S.A. in the World Pastry Cup. He even has a diploma from Ecole Lenotre in Paris, the Harvard of pastry schools.

The accolades hardly end there. In 1994 and 1995 he received notice for being one of the "Top 10 Pastry Chefs in America" in Chocolatier Magazine. And for several years running, Ho has been chairman of World Pastry Cup Team U.S.A. The team is composed of top American pastry chefs, whom Ho helps choose. (The newest team, under Ho's stewardship, is gearing up for the next competition, to be held in April 2001 in Lyons, France.)

In addition to making a mean mango mousse, Ho is an expert in pastillage, the art of sugar sculpture. If you've ever seen colorful ribbons of sugar adorning chocolate swans, meringue mushrooms or gingerbread houses with candy-cane roofs, you've got a vague idea of Ho's artistry. This art is much, much harder than it looks. Don't bother trying it at home.

I caught up with him behind the Hilton's sprawling bakeshop, in his inner sanctum. The Hilton has given him a private studio for creating masterpieces out of sugar and chocolate. This is where, one sees, he spends his happiest and most productive hours.

When I spot him, he is standing over a molding machine. This is a complicated French contraption used to create intricate plastic molds for chocolate. Soon, his newest mold, shaped like a rippled kidney, will be used to create one of his edible works of art.

Ho shows me his French sugar spinner, like a fancy cotton candy machine. It looks, to a layman's eye, like a giant lathe. "My studio was flooded," he says, apologetically, "so I don't have so many of my carvings to show you right now, as several of them did not survive the flood."

But what he does point out is impressive enough. One carving is an enormous Herculean statue of molded chocolate, crowned by an air-brushed logo for a veterinarian's conference currently in the hotel. Flanking it, looking slightly surrealistic, are two bright red, oversized lobsters, created entirely from spun sugar.

He excuses himself to deliver several trays of a dessert he has made for a special party, and soon returns with an extra one for me. It is an ethereally light caramel mousse flanked by a tiny drum of chocolate cream, dotted with fresh berries and drizzled with a raspberry coulis. And it is sheer divinity on a plate.

After I finish, he takes me on a tour of his main facility. While doing so, he tells me a little about himself.

"In college, at the University of Hawaii, I wanted to study architecture, or get involved with the travel industry. I started cooking as a sideline. First I worked as an ordinary chef. Later I became a garde-manger, responsible for cold hors d'oeuvres, some desserts and decorative work. From there, it was easy to make the transition to pastry chef."

Ho's domain is like any other hotel bakery, except perhaps in scale. When he arrived in 1979 this was the largest hotel in the world. The pastry area is the size of a medium-sized ranch house. Looking around, one sees giant commercial dough mixers, stacks of 50-lb. flour bags and tray after tray of breads and pastries on tall metal racks.

This is early afternoon, the quiet time for a hotel bakery, so Ho can give me the grand tour without disturbing his bakers. One by one, he shows me the locked metal refrigerators where the day's desserts are stored.

One fridge is stocked to the gunwales with delicate little petit fours for the hotel's upscale French restaurant, Le Montrachet. Another one has yet-to-be-decorated birthday cakes, Boston cream pies, carrot cakes and snowball-shaped mango mousses. "You have to keep them locked," he says with a shrug, "or the employees will eat them and there won't be enough left for the dinner service."

Next we visit a giant walk-in cooler, where specialty items such as chocolate ganache, hazelnut paste and pistachio cream are stored. Finally, he shows me his pastry book of color snapshots. Meyer lemon curd tart with raspberry sorbet makes my mouth water. Cappuccino glace, a triangular mass of ice cream covered with Oreo cookie crumbs, wakes my inner child.

Later, back in Ho's office, he shows me hand-drawn diagrams of his creations, and what do you know? They look, with their carefully stenciled components and multiworded descriptions, rather like architectural drawings. Ho, perhaps unknowingly, has fulfilled his youthful ambitions in a way he probably never could have imagined back then.

"I guess you have to have some native ability," he admits, modestly. "I could teach you the fundamentals of what I do, but in the end, you have to have an eye for it."

He's quite optimistic about Team U.S.A.'s chances in the upcoming World Pastry Cup, by the way. The team has already won bronze and silver medals in the competition, but he feels that the 2001 squad will be his best one ever, and has a real chance to win the gold.

"The younger crowd is more innovative than us old-timers," he says, again being overly modest. Ho may come across as a modest man, but his desserts, pastries and sugar art are anything but.