I have a special talent. I can tell whether I’m going to like the food at a restaurant even before I taste it. It’s a thing I’ve always been able to do. Sometimes I still eat there even if I know I wont like it, just to prove to myself that I can still do it. D bar in Hillcrest made it easy for me to tell. The D stands for dessert. It’s a dessert restaurant. This place knows that the dessert is the best part of the meal, and that sometimes you should just skip the dinner and get right to the good stuff. The place is a lovely and open whitewashed use of space — high and airy and you can breath deeply the wafting smell of melted chocolate and other gooey things you just can’t wait to get your hands on. Oh, they have dinner, they just don’t seem to be anywhere near as obsessed with it as other places. Owner Keenan Gerhard joined us and shared his vision of sinful desserts and cocktails taking center stage in a dinner obsessed world. I recall all the fancy dinner places where they would go to painstaking lengths for the dinner entrée and employed a fussy sommelier to hand pick all the pairings with expensive imported hooch, but featured a limited sissy little card sized list of the same desserts over and over again: the crème brulee, the tiramisu, the chocolate lava cake. If they had a bread pudding it was a whole big deal. You could color me unimpressed.

But this place is different. Sure, the dinner is tasty, but it doesn’t stop there. The dessert gets the big spotlight at D Bar. After noshing on some delectable stuffed dates and vanilla bacon shrimp poppers and lobster risotto to rival little Italy’s, we dove into dessert. Not one to shun the nerdy, we had the D=mc squared. It’s a multi-level concoction of pure awesome, with milk chocolate mousse, salted caramel, and tasty peanut butter krispy thingies. The ch ch churros were divine with several gooey dipping sauces, and while normally I avoid anything made with fresh fruit while I still have room for more chocolate, I finished with the tropical Fandango; a tart key lime custard with pineapple mango salsa and white chocolate cream that pretty much knocked me out.

Beyond enjoying my own meal, I like to observe the other diners. Here, they were surprised and happy when each new plate arrived. And one guy nearly freaked out in preemptive sugar shock when he was presented with a huge painters palette of build your own sundae.

This place is still a bar though, featuring many interesting candy-like cocktails, like the salted caramel martini, the Blue Star with blueberry vodka and whiskey sour with real egg white in it. I think I started to lose my sober critic’s façade at my third cocktail. Normally I’d say that salted caramel has had its day, but folks, this one had vodka in it… mm’k?

Drinks, dinner aaannndd dessert.  That’s why it’s the D Bar.  One cannot help but love this place and its friendly sugar coated owner, a man I can only refer to as Gerhard.  The original Wonka-style dreamer, creating a magical chocolate garden with marshmallow clouds and candy trees.  So come for the dessert, but stay for the food.