19 December 2025
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To make one of the standout courses at Nicōsi in San Antonio, chef Tavel Bristol-Joseph and his team add caramelized Texas sweet onions and a powder made from scallion greens to a base of jammy eggs, then finish with a hit of blackened garlic.
If you spotted ramen flavors, you’re on the right track, but the dish, like every one of the eight in Nicōsi’s tasting menu, is dessert – the green onions have been transformed into a spongecake crumble and the garlic, with hints of chocolate and coconut from its overcooking, has been churned into an ice cream.
“Nicōsi gives you that opportunity to be able to play with ingredients,” Bristol-Joseph says. “When you take that first taste, most people, if not every person, they get converted.”
The boundary-blurring restaurant, recognized with a MICHELIN Star in October, is the culmination of Bristol-Joseph’s three decade-long career as a pastry chef, a position in the world of fine dining that’s rarely afforded the spotlight.
But a meal here is no sugar rush. The concept applies dessert techniques to dinnertime flavors, arranging the platings around profiles of acid, umami, bitter and – at the end – sweet. Alliums are creamed, seaweed is freeze dried, beef is gelatinized.
“Dessert is a really special art. I don’t think it’s easy. I don’t think that it’s given enough credit. There is a lot of craftsmanship,” Bristol-Joseph says.
Bristol-Joseph’s introduction to pastries came as a teenager in Guyana, when he had a habit of skipping his homework. As a punishment, his aunt would confine him on Saturdays to the kitchen, where they would bake traditional favorites like cookies, cheese rolls and pine tarts (a triangular pocket filled with pineapple jam) for their church.
“After a while I was like, ‘Man, I kind of like baking anyway, plus I’ve got a sweet tooth, so I don’t even care if I get punished any more,’” he says.
After moving to the U.S. at age 17, Bristol-Joseph earned a degree in pastry arts from The New York Restaurant School. While working at The River Café in Brooklyn, a sous chef noted his interest in pastries and recommended he visit Room 4 Dessert, then a downtown hotspot at the forefront of a haute dessert scene.
“It was that inspiring for me,” Bristol-Joseph says, “the calmness, the elegance, the attention to details. It was really just a special experience that stuck with me for years.”
The idea for his own dessert bar stayed high on his wish list as he moved through kitchens in New York, Arizona and Texas, where he opened Emmer & Rye (Bib Gourmand) on Austin’s popular Rainey Street and Hestia, which became one of the state’s first One-MICHELIN-Star restaurants in the inaugural 2024 selection.
In 2024, he opened Nicōsi in a small tasting room in the back of Pullman Market, his gourmet food hall in San Antonio’s stylish Pearl development.
Now on its fifth menu, the restaurant has become a proving ground for high-concept pastry work, with its team of chefs documenting their research and development – for example, how to give melon the texture of tuna sashimi – on social media.
“Wanting to create a space where pastry chefs are celebrated is very important to me, because I know the struggles of pastry chefs – a space that they can call their home, where they don't have to fight for a spatula, where they don't have to yell for their equipment,” Bristol-Joseph says.
Despite its eye-catching premise, the restaurant is designed to focus diners’ attention in the moment: photos are prohibited, with cellphone cameras covered up with stickers, and little is revealed about the menu ahead of time.
That allows Bristol-Joseph to play with guests’ expectations and flip preconceived notions – about specific ingredients, dessert, even the idea of dinner itself – upside down.
“How do you convert someone's mindset? A lot of times as humans, we make up our mind on something because we had a bad experience or something of that nature, but given the right opportunity, cooked the right way, maybe we’ll change our minds,” he says.
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Main Dish at Nicōsi - ©Robert Jacob Lerma /Nicōsi
