Close your eyes. Think back over your last year of eating out. What dishes were most memorable?

Do you remember all the components of one dish or the overall sensation you had moving your fork through it? Do you recall innovative flavor combinations or intriguing texture contrasts?

We are eating out at a time when many chefs are clambering over one another to find and locate and hoard The Next IT. What will IT be? Towering and toppling used to be IT. Thirty tiny tidbits have been IT. Right now, fearlessly foraging fronds is IT.

While IT is being hunted tirelessly, many of us clear a less trampled path. We choose flavor above all else. We seek to find, eat, and create deliciousness.

Some might call us old-fashioned. We prefer old-school. We prefer O.G., Original Grandma. We call it punk rock, no bullshit, the real deal — food, as it is supposed to taste. Brooks Headley proudly stands in the “Flavor First” camp.

By modern-technology and social-media standards, Brooks is elusive. He doesn’t tweet or use Facebook, and when I googled his name, his life as a drummer in various punk bands showed up but, until he won the James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef award this May, little else that was current presented itself.

I’d heard about the “dessert experience” he performs at Del Posto, but didn’t know when I’d have enough Benjamins to eat there.

Born and raised in Towson, a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, Brooks began cooking in Washington, DC, pastry specifically, in 1999. I asked him, why pastry?

His response: “I was a staunch vegetarian when I started cooking professionally (obviously ‘90s-punk-rock related) and had no desire to cook meat. It felt just like crafting 1-2-1-2-end punk songs. So I fell into pastry because there was no meat butchery involved. It was all very accidental. I had no deep dessert feelings at all.

“Laurie Alleman-Weber was my first boss. She fucking taught me everything. She taught me how to make crème anglaise, on the meat line, between two gnarly dudes with bubbling cauldrons of veal stock, bones sticking out past the surface tension. She taught me to love and respect green-market fruit. She taught me how to make pâte choux, whipping your wrist in a C motion to avoid a super lame spike on top.”

After a series of stints working in small houses (generally, restaurants with less than fifty seats), Brooks tried out for the pastry job at Del Posto.

“When [chef Mark Ladner] hired me, he told me, flat out, ‘Dude, hiring you is a fucking total risk.’ It has been my goal not to disappoint him for the past five-plus years.

“I was coming from Komi in DC (thirty-two seats, five dinners a week). Del Posto is 350 covers a day, not including three private party rooms. He loved my food, but I wasn’t really qualified to run that kind of operation. Also, I’d never worked in NYC before! I’d worked for Nancy Silverton at [the late] Campanile in Los Angeles, as pastry sous, and [had been] pastry chef at Komi, but never in New York City.”

While "IT" is being hunted, many of us clear a less trampled path. We choose flavor above all else. We seek to find, eat, and create deliciousness. Headley proudly stands in the “Flavor First” camp.

Although there are thousands of restaurants to choose from in the Big Apple, many of them have dessert menus that are similar or identical. If an establishment can afford a pastry chef, most work alone, as a team of one; if you’re lucky, perhaps there will be two people. We’re considered a luxury in an industry paid for by people with more than enough expendable income. If the economy tanks, if diners don’t order enough dessert, if numbers inflate in the kitchen but deflate in the dining room, the pastry chef is the first to go.

Because pastry chefs walk this tightrope, most owners want last courses to be familiar, easy, staid, and stuck in the past. Most houses play it safe. Those of us who want the ubiquitous mint-leaf garnish, molten chocolate cakes, out-of-season fruit, and sauce squeezed out of plastic bottles to be banished forever can have a hard time finding a job.

The ideal menu — and meal — is one in which what you eat as your last course references each course that preceded it. If a meal is a sentence, the sweet course is its full stop.

That contiguous meal is born from a strong relationship between the savory and pastry chefs. Finding one’s kitchen partner is a formidable journey. And, as is the case with romance, finding said person doesn’t guarantee you’ll be with him always. Restaurants close. People move. Chefs have kids. Ownership changes.

Brooks definitely feels as though he has found a comrade in Mark Ladner.

“I feel totally blessed to have accidentally found Ladner. He is one of my best friends in the world at this point, and has had my back since my early days at Del Posto, where I fucked up a lot.

“He is a genius of Italian food and has taught me much about hospitality, humility, and grace.… All while we were (and are) getting our asses kicked by insane numbers. Del Posto is a big, crazy resto! And that guy works service almost every day, studies shit and reads constantly, is a fucking total comedian, and a force of inspiration for me daily. Should I stop gushing here? Yeah, I do not really know of another pastry chef who has found a savory-chef soul mate like that. I kinda won the fucking lottery.”