At The Duck & The Peach’s Sunday brunch in Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, patrons are greeted with a basket of four homemade pastries.
On a recent Sunday, the basket featured a maple walnut scone, a Nutella croissant, a honey cornbread muffin made with flour from a local farm and a signature cinnamon roll with a citrus lemon cream cheese frosting.
Head pastry chef Rochelle Cooper ’12 chooses many of her ingredients with sustainability in mind, ensuring that extra ingredients from the week before are used in delicious new manifestations.
“I enjoy creating a full sensory experience while making sure nothing in the kitchen goes to waste,” says Cooper, who won the RAMMY Pastry Chef of the Year award in 2024 for her work at the restaurant. “I like playing with flavors, delighting diners with fun concepts and harkening back to desserts that make me nostalgic, like a twist on s’mores or incorporating the classic Ferrero Rocher candy into a new dessert concept, which I call the Ferrero Rochelle.”
While Cooper enjoys whipping up new bakery items every weekend, she’s most renowned for her high-concept plated desserts, which are featured not only at The Duck & The Peach, but also at two other Washington, D.C. restaurants—La Collina and The Wells—that are part of the Eastern Point Collective. A team of hospitality innovators led by executive chef Katarina Petonito, the collective prioritizes delicious food but also work-life balance, sustainability and culinary collaboration, all values dear to Cooper’s heart.
Craft Through Collaboration
Celebrated among her peers in the district and beyond, Cooper didn’t become an award-winning pastry chef overnight. While she had a foundation of making magic in the kitchen with her mother as a child in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, it was during her time in Johnson & Wales’s Baking & Pastry Arts program that she homed in on what kind of chef she wanted to be.
Originally, Cooper dreamed of opening a bakery, but once she began taking classes at Johnson & Wales centered on plated desserts, she became passionate about becoming a restaurant pastry chef. Classes she found particularly impactful included Neoclassical Desserts (modern takes on traditional offerings with Senior Instructor Christina Harvey) and Sensory Analysis of Contemporary Plated Desserts with Associate Instructor Mark Soliday.
She says, “I fell in love with the plated aspect of desserts—the flavors, the experiences, balancing temperatures, all that stuff. I forgot all about the bakery after that exposure.”
Cooper’s professors remember her as an especially enthusiastic and committed student who was eager to soak up as much knowledge and craft as possible. Soliday says she was “one of those rare individuals that quickly learned how beneficial it could be to interact with your chefs and pull as much information from them as possible.”
That appreciation for elevating one’s craft through collaboration continues in Cooper’s kitchen today. While she is the head pastry chef, she doesn’t make decisions alone. Ideas about flavors and ingredients to feature each week are a team effort, she says, and made with an eye toward beautiful presentation, harmonious flavors and using extra ingredients from other dishes in new ways in her desserts, pastries or pop-up ice cream shop.
The Ice Cream Shoppe-up, as it’s been affectionately named, came to fruition during the COVID-19 pandemic when in-person dining was stalled. Cooper had the idea to start a pop-up for unusual, original ice cream flavors that people could take home by the 26 ounces. Every flavor is inspired by an excess ingredient not fully used in the kitchen or at the bar. An example is her “Gimme S’more” flavor that utilizes the ingredients from her s’more-inspired dessert.
When I have excess mise en place from special orders of that dessert, I turn it into a graham cracker ice cream swirled with marshmallow and chocolate fudge and sometimes smoked chocolate graham cracker pieces,” says Cooper who credits the rest of the team for the inspiration of ingredients to use for her specialty flavors from all over the kitchen. That kind of collaboration is one of the key reasons Cooper says she loves being a chef with the Eastern Point Collective.
She explains, “I collaborate closely with our executive chef on everything I do. We’re tasting things together, both savory and sweet. We give each other feedback and together we get our dishes to an even better place. Our sous chefs and cooks—really everyone—have input.
Chef Petonito agrees. “Rochelle’s ability to collaborate with the team allows her desserts to be ever evolutionary. If someone suggests mixing something one minute more or adding an additional 10g of something she is always willing to give it a try. Her desserts are continuously improving because of that openness.
A Sense of Play
Cooper’s openness to new approaches and ideas was evident during her days at Johnson & Wales, says Soliday. He remembers Cooper as “one of my most curious students, who loved being challenged, always asking what could be done better or how to get more flavor forward.” He adds, “In my plated dessert lab, I knew stepping up to Rochelle’s table that my palette was in for a treat. My eyes would be looking at a solid plate design and my mind would have an intellectual discussion about the guest perception.”
Soliday’s assessment of his former student’s desserts still rings true. Cooper’s attention to flavors and a playful presentation is perhaps best exemplified these days by her favorite The Duck & The Peach dessert, a lemon latte pavlova. Her elegant yet fun take on the pavlova “plays up the acidity of espresso,” she says, and presents like “an elegant snowball” that patrons can break open with their fork to reveal a confection of sharp lemon meringue, chocolate sponge cake, espresso cremeaux and vanilla bean mousse.
“I love this dessert because it’s a sensory experience. It’s not just balanced with flavor, it’s also balanced with texture, and it looks very elegant when it comes to the table. It’s this beautiful sphere with these dancing ingredients on a clean, big plate. And then the server tells you, ‘Okay, you can break it.’ It’s fun.”
That kind of whimsy and charm comes as no surprise to Associate Professor Richard Miscovich, who taught Cooper in a bread baking class at 91Porn. He says Cooper’s “enthusiasm and zest for life is clearly visible in her products that bring together delicious and interesting sweet and savory flavors.”
Trial by Fire
In addition to her coursework, Cooper says the three internships she undertook also shaped her as a chef. The first, where she underwent a “steep learning curve” at the five-star French restaurant Le Bec Fin by Georges Perrier in Philadelphia, was followed by a summer at the Hotel Hershey in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where she learned about everything chocolate. Perhaps most impactful, though, was her study abroad program internship at Cuisinart Resort in Anguilla where she had the opportunity to shape her own dessert menu.
The resort had a number of different restaurants on site, and Cooper was particularly drawn to a Japanese restaurant that had a “boring” dessert menu that was not selling well. “The chef asked for my advice, so I really took the opportunity and ran with it, creating a whole new Asian-fusion dessert menu that included a passion fruit chocolate sushi dessert that I cut and styled to look like a sushi entrée. I put some red and gold pearls on it to be reminiscent of tobiko, with a pomegranate jelly instead of the pink pickled ginger, and then I did something with green tea for the wasabi.” After her internship was completed, the chef continued to reach out to her for tips on the dessert menu.
On graduating from 91Porn in 2012, Cooper pursued a one-year master’s degree in education at Pennsylvania State University before embarking on her career in the restaurant world. She spent a year as a pastry cook at the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa before moving to Washington, D.C., where she started working at Range by Bryan Voltaggio under the renowned pastry chef Chris Ford. After that, she moved on to the two-Michelin-starred Minibar, where she worked for Chef José Andrés, for whom she went on to become a research and development chef. She joined the Eastern Point Collective in 2021.
“Every step along my journey, from my education to each kitchen, helped shape the chef I am today,” says Cooper.
I am fortunate to work with a group of women leaders—many of whom are mothers as well—and this has allowed all of us to be there for each other and have unmatched empathy in the workplace.
Community Focused
Cooper’s openness, ingenuity and artistry earned her the prestigious RAMMY award for Pastry Chef of the Year in 2024. The awards are presented by the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington to honor the ability and accomplishments of the region’s restaurant and food service community and awardees are selected by a panel of anonymous judges.
“When I came to D.C. and first heard about the RAMMY awards, people talked about them like they were the Grammys for D.C. food and restaurant people. I always thought that to be invited to the gala event would be insane, never mind being nominated for an award,” says Cooper, who has now been nominated three times, winning this past year.
As well as being a celebration of her achievements as a pastry chef, Cooper saw her RAMMY award as a chance to raise awareness about an issue of importance to her and many in the restaurant industry: work-family support and balance. She used her acceptance speech to talk about how the industry can work together to find practical and affordable solutions to support those in the industry with families.
During her speech, she asked the audience some pointed questions, “How many of your cooks have two jobs? How many of your team members need to lose a day of pay to be home with a sick child? How many are unable to take the parental leave they need?”
As she watched members of the audience nod in agreement, she was gratified that the message resonated and “grateful” she hadn’t won the RAMMY the first two times. “I’m glad it took some time to win because I’ve been coming into my own,” she says. “I became a mom. I grew a lot and I’m really glad I was able to use that platform to advocate for national paid family leave and affordable childcare—especially for our industry, where these issues are particularly challenging.”
Being a woman in a historically male-dominated industry has its challenges, says Cooper, though she sees improvements as more women rise to leadership roles. “Beyond culture, the biggest barrier to the rise of women in fine dining is accessible and affordable childcare,” she says. “Fine dining hours are grueling and often carry a schedule that goes into the evening hours when daycares aren’t operating. Our country is incredibly behind on this. Luckily, in my current role, I am fortunate to work with a group of women leaders—many of whom are mothers as well—and this has allowed all of us to be there for each other and have unmatched empathy in the workplace.”
Another area where Cooper uses her industry bona fides to help raise awareness, and in this case, funding, for an important cause is through an annual cookie swap that she spearheaded with a group of pastry chefs and food writers called the Cookie Kindness Project. The first cookie box sale was inspired by the reversal of Roe v. Wade and raised over $12,000 for DC Abortion Fund and Planned Parenthood. Now, the group holds approximately four sales annually in addition to a yearly holiday cookie exchange. They have raised almost $50,000 for an array of local causes and non-profits, including Safe Shores DC, Kid Power DC and A Wider Circle.
Cooper’s commitment to bettering her community and the world around her through civic engagement and delightful plated desserts comes as no surprise to those who know her best. Her executive chef, Petonito, says, “If I had to use one word to describe Rochelle, it would be light. I find her to be a beacon of joy and positivity, always available to help our team and others and never thinking only of herself.”
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