Pastry Chef Antonio Bachour | Miami

Anyone with a sweet tooth in Miami needs to know Antonio Bachour.

The executive pastry chef at the new St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort, Bachour creates eye-catching (and tongue-startling) desserts for the restaurants Atlantico and J&G Grill, and also for hotel events.

His desserts are explosions of color, taste and texture (click here to see a slide show). Pineapple carpaccio ($9), from the J&G Grill spring menu, is a delicate palate cleanser, embellished with cilantro syrup and key-lime sorbet.

Bachour highlights a variety of fruit when he prepares Jean-Georges Vongerichten's famous J&G Cheesecake ($10). We tasted a vermilion field on a plate, the cake topped with cubes of crisp strawberry and accompanied by a scoop of Bachour's rhubarb sorbet and a swirl of red wine-rhubarb sauce.

Bachour's creativity is most unfettered with the modern desserts he prepares for hotel events.  His dessert of the moment is a namelaka, a creamier Japanese version of panna cotta, dotted with tart mango gel and dainty flowers.

Miami's rightfully lauded pastry chef Hedy Goldsmith (of Michael's Genuine) was recently nominated for her first James Beard Award.

We venture to say that Bachour might be next in line.