Accurso's owner, Anthony Accurso, knew that he needed an edge to compete in The Pitch's Sugar Rush, held February 27 at the Guild. So he called in his secret weapon: his grandmother.
Angel Barelli opened her kitchen last week to the restaurant's two chefs, Michael Clough and Joseph Jackson, and showed them how to make her recipe for sour-cream-topped, New York-style cheesecake. Jackson added a Concord-grape reduction and a peanut-butter cream sauce (and put honey in the sour cream) for his new version of the dessert.
- Anthony Accurso
- (Left) Joseph Jackson, Patrick Moylan, Anthony Accurso and Michael Clough celebrate their win.
Clough and Jackson also worked up a s'mores dessert (a brownie with marshmallow meringue, a tempered chocolate bar and graham-cracker streusel) and a flourless chocolate cake topped with a mascarpone-pear sauce and a piece of salted peanut brittle. Together, the three desserts earned Accurso's top honors at Sugar Rush.
"We did our best to make a show out of it," Accurso says. "To get first place, our first time out, we were pretty proud."
