My first thought when I spotted chef Connor Kaminsky in the kitchen at Dom’s Taverna one afternoon was that he looked young. “I’m 25,” he tells me, sliding into a booth across from me, where we discover we’re the same age.
At 25, Kaminsky is already chef de cuisine at Dom’s, and the mind behind its coveted Basque cheesecake — the very thing that brought me there that day. I had tried it for the first time a few weeks earlier and had since been unable to get it out of my mind.
“It’s a family recipe,” he says. His grandfather, “Grappa,” picked it up in a cooking class during a medical conference trip to San Sebastián decades ago. It became a staple at family gatherings. So when chef Dom Crisp asked Kaminsky to create a Basque cheesecake for an early promotional dinner, he knew just the recipe. Kaminsky made it in his parents’ kitchen in the Valley, where he was living at the time, and drove it all the way to Dom’s.
It was a hit.
That night effectively cemented its place on the menu. Since then, Kaminsky estimates he has baked more than 300 of them, continually refining oven temperature, timing, and technique, while keeping the exact recipe closely guarded like the Krabby Patty secret formula. The cheesecake also appears in a spoonful version, the La Cuchara, topped with a dollop of Ossetra caviar.
Kaminsky started cooking alongside Grappa when he was 6. He remembers helping him prepare Thanksgiving dinner each year for 20 people. “He’s the reason I got into cooking,” he says. Grappa would later tell Kaminsky he knew he would become a chef during those Thanksgivings spent alongside him in the kitchen.
At 16, Kaminsky took his first back-of-house job at a customizable pizza place, mainly to make money, not yet imagining cooking as a career. He bounced through jobs unrelated to food until college at Washington State, where he picked up a line cook position on the sauté station. He later worked as a chef at a private school and a rehabilitation center. Then came the call to work at Dom’s, and he jumped at the opportunity.
Kaminsky says diners often ask for the cheesecake recipe, telling him they’ve tried to re-create it at home but “can’t seem to get it right.” On paper, Basque cheesecake is simple — cream cheese, sugar, eggs, heavy cream, and flour — but, he explains, the difference is in the details: timing, temperature, and an exacting process. “I’m using five different settings on the oven to make sure it comes out exactly how I want it — perfectly jiggly.”
It’s a standard he’s still refining. “Right now,” he says, “is the moment in time where it’s the best it’s ever been.”
Dom’s Taverna is located at 30 East Victoria Street. See domstaverna.com.
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