Duni Borga poses with a Cuatros Leches
It was her first birthday in Texas, Duni Borga recalls, when her husband Taco made her a cake she would remember forever. This cake in particular had significant meaning already, having been made with the same recipe Taco’s nanny used during his childhood when he was living in Spain – its presentation on his wife’s birthday celebration that night would only serve to further its sentimental value. It was of course a hit, and unsurprisingly, Duni soon learned the recipe for that storied tres leches cake.
And then she changed it.
“I fell in love with that cake that he made me,” she says, breaking into a grin, “But I had to make it my own.”
And so, to that tres leches cake was added arequipe, which Borga describes as “like dulce de leche but creamier,” to make it a cuatro leches. And if that weren’t enough to make it her own, she then saw fit to cover it all in meringue.
An assortment of cupcakes at La Duni
Duni Borga doesn’t merely like to make good desserts – she strives to make them memorable. And at La Duni, the restaurant she and Taco established more than 10 years ago, Duni is still building on her reputation as a passionate, creative and masterful pastry chef whose talent is perhaps only exceeded by her graciousness and welcoming manner. For her customers, La Duni should feel just like a family at home, and she does everything in her power to make it seem as such.
“My family has always been my inspiration, and with the desserts, I think I got that from my grandmother. She used to bake, and I remember getting off the bus from school whenever she was visiting – I knew she was at my house before I even crossed that door,” says Borga, who is from Columbia. “The bus would stop right in front of the house, I would take some steps, and the minute I got closer I could smell vanilla or chocolate or something coming out of that house, and I knew my grandma was visiting. My eyes would just light up and I couldn’t wait to see what was on that table. Well, having a family I always wanted to do that for my son. And then when we were planning the restaurant, I wanted the same thing for my guests. Just have them walk in and go ‘Wow! I can’t wait for dessert!’”
To define how well Borga has recreated that feeling among her customers is no difficult task: five minutes spent near the pastry counter during lunch will most likely reveal more than a few gawkers, pointers, and comments about which one a particular diner is going to order after lunch. While Taco oversees the much-lauded lunch and dinner menus, it’s the sweets at the front that serve as the eye candy.
Why stop at pastries? Borga also makes a large assortment of cookies and other sweets.
Clearly, the desserts look inviting to an American crowd, but Borga isn’t simply catering to a taste she thinks her customers expect. Rather, with her pastries, she is attempting to relate the influences of the seven national cuisines that La Duni offers: Columbian,Brazilian, Cuban, Peruvian, Argentinian, Mexican, and Venezuelan. Borga is defying the perception that La Duni’s fare is just another manifestation of ‘Tex-Mex,’ and in fact has greater influences from across the Atlantic than from across the Rio Grande.
“Yes, we have the flan and the sopapillas, but what most people don’t realize is we have such a high influence of all the European pastries in our countries, especially French pastries, though they’re of course done with the more tropical fruits because that’s what we have there,” she says. “You find all of those influences, but yet they have to go with what is available in the region. And I think that’s what makes it so absolutely wonderful, because you find your regular Napoleon that is filled with maracuya, which is passion fruit, and then topped with a fabulous white cream and you just cannot get it in Europe because they don’t have those fruits available there. You get the apples and the pears and things like that, and those can be wonderful. But then we get the pineapples, and the bananas, and the passion fruit and the guayaba (guava), and the lucuma and all of these great things that people are just starting to get to know. I wish I were able to get half of the fruits that I grew up with and make my desserts with them. But they’re so hard to import that I have to work with what I have here.”
While her inventiveness and creativity seem to know few bounds, Borga is familiar with the sense of hesitation in a customer’s eyes when he or she sees an ingredient or a fruit they’ve never tried before. Even with some of the more accessible ingredients, winning people over from their tried-and-true favorite desserts is not always an easy thing.
“I absolutely love a pastry that is called gloria. It’s a breakfast or afternoon pastry, and it took me about four years of making it until people actually started eating them and ordering them. But I didn’t give up, I kept making those and having people taste them. When I told them it’s homemade puff pastry filled with guava and baker’s cheese, they’d look at me like “Guava? Uh, no. What do you have with apples?’” She says with a laugh. ” But most everybody’s afraid to try something they’re not familiar with. And it takes that first step to try it. I have people that come to the restaurants often, and they always order the same thing every time, and I’ll sit here and look at them and be like, ‘There’s so many other things on that menu, you should try something else!’ But it is really hard to get out of your comfort zone.”
If indeed the comfort zone is a difficult thing to escape when it comes to exotic-sounding ingredients and foreign fare, Duni pushes the envelope even further with her newest ice cream creations in Fairview, where they are producing Mi Crema, an ice cream created almost instantly with liquid nitrogen to produce a final product virtually unattainable through traditional means.
“When you freeze like this (she snaps) with the nitrogen, you get the fluffiest, creamiest most wonderful ice cream, and then we can let the customer choose which ingredients to put in it. That’s why we call it Mi Crema,” she says, then adds with a smile, “It’s my new toy.”
Whether it applies to ingredients or techniques, though, personal bounds and comfort zones are worth breaking out of at La Duni, where the Borgas have worked hard to create an atmosphere that unquestionably eases the transition. If ever there were a place to trust the hosts, this is certainly it.
“‘One of the things that I was raised with, and that I love about the Latin culture,” Duni says, “Is we’re taught that when people sit at your table and they share with you, they are a part of your family for that point in time.”
Yes, they’re decadent, and masterfully created and wonderfully inventive, but in the end, the best thing about ordering dessert after dinner at La Duni might simply be that you get to be family for just a little bit longer.
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A selection of La Duni’s Dessert Selections can be found at Artizone.
