Keep someone sweet

There are whole trends that don't even touch our shores until they've become yesterday's news elsewhere. Some, the early adopters are welcome to: raw food restaurant, anyone? Rice pudding or ceviche bars? Or the bewitching little number rumoured to lurk in the dank recesses of Tokyo's Roppongi district where you can enjoy sexual congress with your chosen animal before chowing down on its roasted carcass?

American fetishes are more vanilla - it's only the sweet tooth they want satisfying. Which explains the phenomenon of the dessert bar, such as San Francisco's Citizen Cake. Or New York's ChikaLicious, where you can get three sweet courses for about £6. Or Room 4 Dessert (the sugar may be of the highest quality but the monikers are pure saccharine), whose best-known dish, Infance, comprised marshmallow letters spelling out 'lucky', toasted angel food cake and jam served in a Chinese soup spoon, milk ice-cream, candyfloss and meringue. Oddly, that joint didn't last.

And now we've got our very own dessert bar, in cute, villagey Shepherd Market, Mayfair, thanks to talented and multi-award-winning chocolatier William Curley.

Following the success of their Richmond shop, William and his wife, Suzue, have launched themselves uptown in this jewel of a store, all twinkling glass displays groaning with signature chocs, often (maybe due to fellow patissier Suzue's influence) demonstrating a delicate, Japanese flavour: jasmine tea, perhaps, or yuzu.

There are ice-creams flavoured with green tea or golden chestnut and biscuits made with miso and walnut. More Britishly, William and his small team also whip up Bakewell tarts and Scottish malt whisky truffles. We head for the dessert bar, a handful of high stools around a small workspace, where 20-year-old Curley protégée Vicki Stroud is beavering away over some ambrosially-scented caramelised hazelnuts. The small menu features ready-baked cakes and patisserie, such as chocolate seasalted caramel tart with Caraïbe chocolate ganache, or wiggly worms of chestnut mousse topping a Mont Blanc.

But we're here for the 'desserts à la carte' where your choice is created in front of you: this is unmissable. First, we get a pre-dessert: thick, mint-fragranced cold chocolate drink - fresh mint leaves are infused for two days in the milk - topped with a dollop of ultra-light Crème Chantilly and flakes of fine chocolate. Then the serious stuff begins.

My millefeuille 'classic' begins with a club sandwich of crisp, nutty pastry sandwiching billowy clouds of Chantilly laced with chocolate confectioners' custard.

Ice-cream, prepared before our eyes by that ultimate piece of culinary kit, the Pacojet, is light but packed with vanilla-seed flavour. On a small hotplate, slices of fresh apple are simmering in caramel and a slurp of cream. These are swirled round the millefeuille and dotted with some of those hazelnuts. The final dish is extraordinarily good, and surprisingly whopping. I wouldn't like to attempt it after a kebab.

Meanwhile, dense, dark cream made from Chuao, a Venezuelan superchocolate, reputed to be the finest in the world, is poured into a crisp, crumbly hazelnut pastry case and baked in a small oven while its green tea ice-cream is Pacojetted. It's served, still warm, on a just-rustled-up compote of fresh raspberries and more of the hazelnuts.

On top of all this ultra-indulgence, I mistakenly order some chilli-laced hot chocolate, thick and viscous like the best Spanish sort and not too sweet. It's ravishing, but I run the risk of turning into Augustus Gloop and beg for some tap water which, after the surfeit of richness, tastes almost as glorious as our confections.

We're the only customers at the bar, and it takes a while to assemble and craft these intricate creations. I worry that if it's busy, people will get agitated over the wait. Vicki is entirely Zen: 'Nobody comes here if they're in a hurry.' Quite.

I love the idea of a dessert bar mid-afternoon indulgence, or post-cinema sugar rush. Or it would make a really fantastic venue for a first date as long as you don't mind the patissiers being able to hear all your sweet nothings.

Me, I can usually live without sweet somethings, but I make an exception for these babies. This is way beyond cake, showing up the likes of Patisserie Valerie for the chain stores they actually are. William Curley may not have come up with the idea but, as an X Factor judge might say, he's made it his own.

Dessert à la carte per person, £10. 32-34 Shepherd Market W1. Tel: 020 7495 0302. www.williamcurley.co.uk. Tube: Green Park

William Curley
32-34 Shepherd Market, W1J 7QN