The Best Cheesecakes in the Universe | Alan Rosen | Talks at Google

Today we have the pleasure of welcoming a third generation restaurateur who currently owns and manages three Juniors restaurants. He also oversees the mail ordering and the online business for Juniors. And I heard, I found out today that Juniors will be distributing in the uk, which is a good thing for them Also. He has recently made appearances on Good Morning America, the Today show and Emeril Live. And today we are very lucky to have him here@Googleplex NYC. And I would like to welcome Alan Rosen.

Thank you very much. It's nice to be here. I was pretty amazed walking through your building just now how food centric a company Google is. It seems like everywhere you turn there's another kitchen and another place to grab a snack. And the fact that all of you came out during your lunch hour to hear me talk is quite flattering. Sarah, thank you for making me feel welcome here today. I appreciate it. My family's been in the restaurant business since the 1900s. My grandfather, when he was a young boy used to work at a soda shop on the Lower east side. And you know, back then it was a candy store and it had a soda shop in the back and they'd sell you an egg cream and a pretzel for a couple of pennies. And his mother in her infinite wisdom said, why don't you try and save a nickel a week? And by the time 1920s rolled around, he was in his 20s. He owned three luncheonettes in Manhattan. He went to go open up, I think it was three or four. He went to go open up in downtown Brooklyn to open up another, it was called the Enduro. And he went to go open up another one and my grandmother went with him at the time and she said, if you open up here, we'll starve. You know, it was like a morgue down there. She said, and he said, honey, if I listen to you, I'll be wearing cigar boxes for shoes. And he decided to open up a restaurant. There was his fifth restaurant actually at that time. Stock market crashed, as we all know. He had to sell four out of the five places. He sold the four in Manhattan, kept the one in Brooklyn, believe it or not, operated that one until 1948, went broke again, believe it or not. You won't read that in the book because my family, I think, blocked it out. He went broke again and decided that he was going to reopen that restaurant. He went to a contractor who, we still know the family, and he said, I don't have any money, but I promise I'll pay you if you help Me build this restaurant called Junior's. Gonna be a family place. My sons are gonna work with me and we're gonna make a go of it. It's gonna be a moderately priced restaurant. And the guy agreed to do it, which is pretty amazing in light of what's going on today in our world. My dad, my uncle and my grandfather continued to work there. And they said, if we're going to be a great restaurant in New York, we have to have great cheesecake. And they literally would go to different stores and buy cheesecake, come back to the restaurant, go up to the second floor and start baking. And they liked the consistency of this one, they liked the crust of this one. They didn't like this one. And that's how they hit upon this magic formula. We started selling it in the early 50s and no one really knew about us except our customers, to be quite honest. And they ran that restaurant. In 1973, the Village Voice wrote an article saying we were the best. And then about two months later or three months later, I'm not sure the exact date, New York magazine came out with this full poster sized, you know, the Cheesecake Olympics and Juniors was at top of the heap. And that really put us on the map. And we became known as a restaurant that not only was a great restaurant, you know, moderately priced restaurant, but we became known as having the best cheesecake in New York. That's the basic building blocks of where we started and where we come from. I came to the business about 16 years ago. We still had our one restaurant in Brooklyn. We started to do a little mail order business. People would call us from Florida and say, I moved from Brooklyn, can you send me a cheesecake? And I would go downstairs and I'd take out my tape gun and we'd start boxing cheesecakes like that. We didn't know what we were doing. We had no clue. We would do it on eight foot wooden tables in our basement. And it started to become a business. We just, we started to send and we made a catalog. I think the first catalog was probably, you know, two of these sheets put together. But now we have a, you know, 12 or 14 or 16 page catalog of cheesecakes. We send out a couple hundred thousand of them a year. We sell cheesecakes on qvc, as some of you may or may not know. You don't look like the QVC crowd, but not a lot of people shop there and just don't tell anybody. And so now we sell a lot of cheesecakes. And we decided we were going to write this book. And my dad said to me, excuse my language, you're effing crazy. He said, you're going to give out the recipe? And I said, yeah, we'll give out the recipe. He said, but people won't have to buy cheesecakes from us anymore. And I said, you know what, dad? They'll still buy cheesecakes from us. And I think they will. The book only came out last week. So far we're hanging tough. But cheesecake, like my business. If you want to make cheesecake at home, and obviously all of you are going to take home this book and I guess make an attempt at it, it takes a little patience and a lot of passion, but once you do it once or twice, you'll own it forever. It'll be yours. It'll be something that you can go to some family or friend's house and say, I'll make dessert. Don't worry about it. And you will literally be able to make from this book an awesome cheesecake, guaranteed. I mean, the results so far have been great. Everything's been triple tested. Just like I feel about my restaurants. We're not going to sell anybody anything that I wouldn't, you know, wouldn't be satisfied with myself. And as you can tell, I'm pretty difficult to please. I don't know if you can tell, but I am. So when you get home tonight, you literally need. If you just want to make a plain cheesecake and you don't want to go, we make a sponge cake on the bottom of our cheesecakes. That's. You got to bake the sponge cake, let it rest, and then put the cheesecake mixture on top and then bake it again. And you're gonna put it in about a half size sheet pan with some water on the bottom. So if you have a springform pan, you're gonna need to cover the bottom with aluminum foil. Otherwise you'll have water leaking into your cheesecake, which will not be good. If the water evaporates, add a little more. Don't open and close the oven 300 times while you're baking it because it's like a souffle cheesecake. It'll literally rise up. Then it'll get golden brown on the edges, which is how we like it. Follow the pictures on the book. That's the color you're looking for. Some people, if you go to the Midwest, you know, all the cheesecakes are white like this. That's not what we do and it's not what New York cheesecake's all about. It's very simple. Cream cheese, fresh eggs, heavy cream, sugar, touch of vanilla. I think we might put a little cornstarch in there. Am I right? I'm right. I thought someone was checking. And so you'll be able to do it once you do it, once you bake the cake, don't move it around your kitchen all day. Let it settle. You can let it settle at room temperature for 3, 4, 5 hours. Don't worry about it. Then cool it overnight, let it set in your refrigerator, then take it out of the pan. Because if you try and take it out of the pan right away, it's going to crack. And that's. Most people have problems with cracking. That's one of the things that goes wrong. You're also, when you blend the ingredients, you're not going to blend it with a whip, you're going to blend it with a paddle. There's a reason for that as well. It's a heavy, dense New York style cheesecake. So you don't want to incorporate a lot of air into it. So you're not just going to throw the mixer on high and go make a phone call and come back 15 minutes later. You're going to have like this aerated cheesecake that's not going to be New York style. It'll probably taste wonderful. It just won't have the consistency of a New York style cheesecake. If anyone has any questions while I'm talking, by the way, just throw them out there because I prepared absolutely nothing, but I could talk for hours about my business. Yes, sir.

What's your favorite plain?

Plain. I sort of have to say that it's a toss up. But if you're a purist, a lot of people believe the only cheesecake you should eat is plain. And they'll look at some of the recipes in this book and they'll say, that's blasphemy. How could you do that? But you know what? Eventually one morning I'm sitting with my dad over coffee and he says, why don't we take a plain cheesecake and put it inside of a chocolate letter cake? That's a devil's food cheesecake. It's one of our most popular items. So you know what could be bad about a chocolate cake filled with cheesecake? So you have that in here. And later on in the cafeteria, you'll have chocolate mousse, cheesecake, plain cheesecake, chocolate mousse covered with chocolate ganache. It's pretty tasty too. So, yes, plain's my favorite. But chocolate doesn't bother me either.

Anyone else, if you have questions, please step up to the microphone. We're recording this. I'm a major junior TCC from Brooklyn.

Thank you. We like it.

You guys make this really awesome cheese pie where there's no sponge cake on the bottom, it's just in it. The crust, the pie crust. So good. I don't know if you can tell me, but I'm going to ask, how do you make the little crunchies on the outside?

That's a macaroon crunch. It's a nut. We actually have someone make it for us. Believe it or not, we used to make it ourselves, but as you get a little bigger, we went to someone and said, it's a macaroon nut. It's toasted and chopped. And quite frankly, I don't know how they do it, but if you come to the restaurant and you need some, I'll get it for you. There's some substitution we actually give you. I don't know if the recipe's in here or we tell you how to get to it, but it's not going to be exactly like what we do because quite frankly, we don't know how to make it anymore. It's gotten so good. It's actually gotten better over the years. As we gave that away to someone else, they actually refined it.

They fight over it at my house. They were like, no, it's my crunchies.

Yeah, but it's nuts. And anyone who's allergic to nuts, I got a letter from someone today who didn't know it was nuts. So thank you. She's talking about the macaroon crunch on all of our fruit pies, strawberry pies. Around the edges, you'll notice about a half inch layer of nuts just to decorate the edges. Makes the cake look more finished. Oh, that's it. I can keep talking about cheesecake then. There's a lot of great pictures here. I'm glad you all got the book. Some of you are probably never going to get to some of the crazy stuff like the candy bar explosion and stuff like this. But it's not that difficult because the basis for everything in this book is that plain cheesecake recipe. So to make a chocolate cheesecake, all you'll have to do is. Am I talking, like, up and down? Is that the problem? All right. All you'll have to do is put some chocolate into your cheesecake mixture and then finish the top. I don't know how many you are. Bakers are going to actually bake a cheesecake Great, that's cool. Thanksgiving pumpkin cheesecake. Pumpkin puree, cinnamon, some spices in the New York style cheesecake. Sure fire hit for the holidays. Let's see what else can I tell you about us? Any more questions? Yes, sir.

Can I ask you a non cheesecake question?

You can ask me any question you want.

I have an interest in the egg cream. Can you give the, you know, your ideal recipe for the egg cream?

Ideal recipe for the egg cream. If you have a glass that's about this big, about that much chocolate syrup, about that much milk, and that much cold seltzer, stir it.

The order of operations, I want real specific here.

Order of operations, chocolate milk, seltzer stir. At the end you can bounce the seltzer off the spoon which will give you that white foamy top. Or you can come to the restaurant, we'll show you how.

And I have another question. It seems like Juniors would have been part of a real thriving Lower east side food culture that isn't quite the same anymore. And how do you think that you survived and a whole bunch of other ones didn't? I know you're in a different location.

I'll give all the credit to my dad. My dad, still 74 years old, comes into the restaurant every day, goes through the walk in boxes, BS's with the chefs, and that's what we all still do. I mean, I still go to every restaurant every day. So if I don't notice the things my dad taught me to notice, then we're going to be in trouble. But we happen to notice that I have a lot of great people working with me. We're opening up our fourth restaurant in May at Foxwoods Casino. They're opening up a new hotel next door. So we're going to open up there and we really keep our eye on the food and the service. And we're a moderately priced restaurant. We believe that for 10 or $12 we over deliver and that's why we're still around. My dad really kept his eye on the ball.

I have sort of two things I'd like to hear you address. One is how did cheesecake become your thing? So obviously Juniors was a diner, but probably didn't set out to sell cheesecake.

No, it wasn't as a specialty.

And the second thing is I notice there's a co author on the book, someone who's described as a recipe specialist. And I wanted you to hear a little bit about that relationship and what that.

Absolutely. The answer to the first part of the question is it was part of my grandfather's mission to have great cheesecake. For some reason, New York style cheesecake was associated with every good restaurant in downtown Brooklyn. There was a brass rail and Lindy's and all these places. I mean, you guys see the Lindy's today. It doesn't have good cheesecake, but way back when, in the 50s, it did. And my grandfather would go to places like that and said, we have to do better than they're doing. And he literally was my uncle even, you know, until he retired about eight years ago, used to bring me back stuff all the time. Everywhere he went, he'd be like, look what I found. He'd bring it back to me and give. It'd be like two days of work to figure out whether we could actually do it or not. But that was their modus operandi, to see something and do it better. And he said, cheesecake's gonna be part of what we do. And we did it, and we became famous for it. It's amazing it worked out that way. I don't think he would have ever imagined that this would be our second book. And we'd have four restaurants, which is no big deal. Don't get me wrong. There's guys with 104 restaurants or 204 restaurants. And the fact that we're giving out the recipe is probably rolling over in his grave right now. But I guess I'll have to get over it. The second question was the relationship with Beth. When we did our first book, I did most of the work, but I needed someone to put it into a book. I'm not a writer by trade, and I'm pretty busy running restaurants. So I met this lady named Beth Allen, and she literally would come to our restaurant every single day and go to the chef and say, how do you make this? And the chef would say, I use this much of this and this much of that. And she somehow put together a cookbook where every recipe worked. We got nothing but compliments, and she was wonderful at it. She almost became part of the family in a way. She was sitting. We have this table where we sit in Brooklyn every morning. Every morning I'd walk in, she started to get there before me, which was early in the morning, because I used to get there at 6:30 and 7 in the morning. Now I'm a little later because I have two young kids, and I like to see them in the morning at 7. So that's what I do. So Beth, when it came time to do the next book, we were building our restaurant in Times Square. And every Day Beth would bring me another cake or another chapter or another three pages and say, look, you know, I made today and look how it came out. And I taste it. And then she'd go back to the drawing board and keep working on it. And that was the process. And you know, so it wasn't as difficult to write this book because she's so good at what she does. Yes.

Okay, well, thanks for coming today.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Everyone's day here.

You didn't eat yet. Wait till you eat.

Perhaps this is a little bit of a cheesecake blasphemy, but is there a low fat recipe besides eating a little?

There is not a low fat recipe in the book. But if you wanted to substitute low fat cream cheese, you can. But I'm certainly not going to direct someone on how to make it because my philosophy is if you're going to have a cheesecake, have a small slice instead and just have the real stuff and you'll be satisfied and, you know, everything in moderation, I guess.

Thank you.

Thank you. If I said anything else, I would be shocked. We did have one years ago, but I did it because QVC forced me to do it and I discontinued it shortly after because it wasn't what I wanted to be known for, though it sold very well, it was certified by the American Heart association, all that stuff. But I just couldn't keep doing it, as you can tell by this guy rolling his eyes in the middle. But. Any other questions? No. I mean, I don't know what else to tell you about juniors. You know, it's amazing Cheesecake, by the way, if anyone doesn't, is the most popular dessert in America right now. More so than apple pie, believe it or not. So once you have this book, you will be able to make the best cheesecake and the most popular cheesecake in the world, I guess. Yes, sir, sure. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you coming out today. Question right now on Amazon, the two reviews for your book are only one star out of five. Correct. And the complaint is that these aren't the authentic recipes. Yeah, well, the first lady believe read the book. I don't think she's that intelligent and anything that didn't say no, I read these, I read these yesterday and I was pissed, trust me. I mean, go on QVC, we get 4.8 stars out of five. We sold QVC 61,000 of these books, we get 4.8 out of five. So one lady thought because the word juniors wasn't in front of the name of the item that it wasn't our recipe, which to me, I don't know how she got that, but that's what she got. The second lady, who claims that the lemon coconut cheesecake is made with buttercream and not whipped cream is 100% correct. We made a mistake. And I went nuts yesterday because the lemon coconut layer cake cheesecake is made with buttercream, not whipped cream. And Beth made a mistake. And trust me, Beth wasn't happy to hear from me yesterday because I missed it. And I read this a bunch of times and I just missed it in the middle of opening a restaurant. So that the second review is legit. The first review, I think the lady just took the fact that the word juniors wasn't present in front of the item. And there'll be a response up there shortly from me. I was writing it last night. No, because, I mean, when I get a customer complaint in my restaurant business, I answer every complaint, everyone. Because there's not that many. I can afford to do that. So do we. That. What? Yeah. Should we sub out buttercream in that recipe then? Is that right? Yeah, you should. Absolutely. And on the next printing, it'll be buttercream guy did his homework. Yeah, I saw that yesterday. I wasn't pleased because our last book got great reviews and on QVC we got great reviews. And we saw, I mean, Amazon, I guess, has sold a few books, but QVC sold 61,000 of them in two weeks. We all laughed when I said QVC at the beginning. Anything else? No. You guys just want to go eat? I'll be more than happy to sign everyone's book upstairs. Oh, yes, sir.

Go ahead.

I'm sorry. I'll do one more question on cheesecake technique. Lots of recipes, have you, when cooking.

A cheesecake, turn the oven off and.

Leave it in the oven for a long time to cool very, very slowly. And I noticed you don't do that. No, what we'd rather you do, you can turn off the oven, take it out of the oven, just let it cool the way we've always done it. We've always cooled at room temperature. Let it settle down. It's going to come out of your pan, it's literally going to rise and just leave it on your counter. You know, put it on top of your stove, whatever, where you can put some metal and just leave it there until it settles down and then put it in your refrigerator, then de pan it the next day. I think you'll just have better luck with that. You know, maybe they're probably saying Leave it in your oven, which you could probably do if you want to leave the oven door open and you don't have little kids just because that way you're not moving it at all. So the less you move it, the better off you're going to be. Please go ahead. Plain? Yeah. The question was, what would I recommend as the first recipe? I would say the plain one. And if you want to leave out the big, you know, the sponge cake crust and you want to go buy. You said you like the pie shell. Go buy a pie crust in the store and just make the filling and then you can make a piece of. You know, you can make a cake with a different crust. It'll take, you know, an hour and ten minutes. Thank you. Anyone else?

Quick question. In terms of, like, serving a dessert, I'm a wine connoisseur. And would you recommend. And I don't know how much you.

Are, but I've had Chateau Yachem.

I have a bottle.

If you have a bottle, then use it.

So turn over a champagne.

You can do both. I mean, I think it's personal preference. I've done both. I mean, I drink anything pretty much on a Saturday night. Rest of the week I'm sober. But yeah, no, I was sort of kidding when I said that. But the fact that you have one, you might as well use it. Yeah, I think it would be delicious. I don't have a bottle of Chateau Ya Chem. So I'll come over, I'll bake the cheesecake for you. I'll bring the cheesecake. Be my pleasure. Any other questions? And cheesecake, you can serve it with any meal. That's what's great about it. I mean, it doesn't matter what you had for dinner. Cheesecake is On, I think, 90% of the restaurant menus in the world. So now it's going to be on your menu in your home, which is kind of nice. Thanks for having me today, folks. I really appreciate it.