Keris Kuwana has the sweetest job in the world—literally. As executive pastry chef at the Lev Group, a company that partners with chefs and restaurants to develop brands and concepts, she gets to make treats all day long for beloved Las Vegas restaurants like Al Solito Posto and La Strega. Previously, the native Hawaiian honed her sweet tooth on the Strip at Aureole and Yardbird, and she recently launched her own line of desserts, Keris Sweets, at select Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf locations across the Valley. The Weekly caught up with the sugar dynamo to talk pastry inspo, mochi doughnuts and turning tiramisu on its head.
How did your interest in pastry begin? I was into diamonds, and I actually graduated with a gemology degree. I loved it … but I never knew exactly what I wanted to do. [Then one day], I was decorating Easter eggs with my cousins, and it was absolutely amazing. The following week, they wanted to do some cookie decorating, and I [realized], I just want to do this. I have my creativity, and I love food, so why not do something with pastries? So I quit my job as a gemologist. Downstairs was a very small cookie shop called Hokulani bakery, a Hawaiian cookie company, and I worked for $7 an hour as a cookie decorator. It was a really fun experience—all we did were cookies and cupcakes.
Strawberry, Oreo and classic glazed mochi doughnut holes
Then you eventually made your way from Hawaii to Las Vegas. I worked for a company called 50 Eggs. I was the corporate chef at Yardbird [in the Venetian] and we did Chica as well and we worked on the pool upstairs. It was super fun—piles of pancakes with syrup and confetti, confetti cakes, all those things. They let me be creative with a peach cobbler. I also worked with Vincent [Pouessel], who’s now at Mon Ami Gabi. We were at Aureole for Charlie Palmer, and they also gave me a lot of creative freedom. I mean, to be a small person from Hawaii and to make it in a large casino, it really is something to feel proud of.
Tell us about your current role at the Lev Group. They are so awesome. We have over 60 locations. I do restaurant development for all of the concepts. There’s a dessert program we’re doing for La Strega. At Al Solito Posto, the famous rainbow cake, the budino, the large crostata and the pour-over tiramisu—those are all of our desserts.
That pour-over tiramisu at Al Solito sounds intriguing. How did that come about? So we didn’t want just the regular tiramisu where you line it with lady fingers and it’s a square cut out of the pan and you slap it on a plate. We wanted something completely different. We took mascarpone mousse—we did a coffee mousse and we froze it into a half sphere that gets popped out and put onto a biscuit joconde. It’s basically a white cake, so it’s slightly drier and absorbs liquid. And so that dome sits on top of that white cake. And of course there’s whipped cream with the tiramisu, so we made little spikes of whipped cream on top of the spheres. It sits in a slightly shallow bowl and we pour the coffee liqueur, with the Kahlua and the espresso, into the bowl tableside. The cake soaks up that liquid, and you’ve got all the flavors of the tiramisu in a very unconventional form.
You just launched your own line of sweets at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, and your specialty is mochi doughnuts. Tell us about that unusual treat. We’re going to start with the regular flavors so people are not too scared to order. Because most of the time, people think that mochi doughnuts are ice cream, and it’s not mochi ice cream. They’re made of glutinous rice flour called Mochiko flour. And then, a little sugar and a little bit of oil. We have a mochi doughnut machine that we actually flew in from Japan. The greatest part about our mochi doughnut is that we don’t use any artificial powders. We use real fruit juice.
Where do you find inspiration when creating desserts? Both Instagram and travel are my go-tos, for sure. On Instagram, I’ll see how some girl does her wafer flowers, and then it kind of carries me into doing things, like, maybe I should do more flowers for our Mother’s Day cupcake, or, I would have never known that they had those Russian ball tips to make these beautiful flowers just in one piping swipe. And then nothing beats travel. You see food in so many different forms. You get to see people’s different approaches into doing things like an Italian wedding cookie or a Mexican cookie. It’s definitely inspirational.
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