Just Desserts
food, gillete campbell county, restaurants,
At The Prime Rib, a dining destination in Gillette since 1983, diners are determined to indulge.
Sure, they come for the signature dish – hand-cut, USDA choice prime rib slow-roasted for 24 hours and served with au jus and horseradish – but they don’t stop there.
“Vanilla ice cream is pretty much the same wherever you go, but we make a lot of our desserts in-house,” says Charles Schlesselman, general manager of the restaurant. “And the one we sell 10-to-one over any other is our raspberries and Russian cream.”
The recipe is as straightforward as it sounds: Fresh berries are topped with sweet cream for a cool way to end a rich meal. “It’s a must-have if you come to The Prime Rib,” Schlesselman says. “It’s a simple dessert, and you just have to try it to understand how good it really is.”
Though The Prime Rib also sells “hundreds and hundreds” of quarts of the creamy concoction to-go, it’s often upstaged by the 24 Karat Cake, which is “super moist and has a great cream cheese frosting,” as well as the Chocolate Lava Cake, which Schlesselman describes as “chocolate beyond chocolate.”
“If you’re a chocolate lover, you’ll get your fix after you’ve eaten it,” he says.
Want to wash down your dessert with something equally as sweet? The Prime Rib’s extensive wine list, which has won many awards including the coveted Wine Spectator Award of Excellence, includes several ports and dessert wines.
Another restaurant that has staked its claim in decadent dining in Gillette is The Chophouse. Executive chef Ray Marini, who trained in France and operated restaurants in Russia, says Gillette’s dining scene has changed quite a bit since he came to town 14 years ago. “When I first came out here, I made garlic mashed potatoes one night and people told me I was crazy and no one in Gillette would eat them. Now everybody in town has them,” he says. “With the influx of different people in the town, it’s really diversified things. People are eating desserts now they wouldn’t have eaten five years ago, and they’re willing to try more than chocolate cake and pie.”
Marini makes sure his dessert menu at The Chophouse steers clear of those mainstays because he knows his competition is stiff. “In this area, people make their own pies a lot, and I don’t want to compete with grandma and mom,” he says.
So he ventures slightly outside that culinary comfort zone with seasonal variations of crème brulée, panna cotta and a peanut butter mousse topped with chocolate ganache. Other sweet treats include an eight-pound chocolate cake, a molten cupcake with fudge sauce and “a bunch of different garnishes like spun sugar, gaufrettes or pretzel sticks dipped in white or dark chocolate,” he says.
Marini and his team are always looking for ways to improve The Chophouse, and that includes taking their customer comments very seriously. They’ve thought often about taking the cheesecake and tiramisu off the menu, but customers won’t have it.
“We try to keep things seasonal,” Marini says. “I’m one of those people who believes that berries are best when the man upstairs says they’re best, though you can get them frozen any time of the year. But the cheesecake and tiramisu are safe, because if we took them off the menu, we’d really hear about it.”
Story by Danny Bonvissuto
