Hay-Adams hires Josh Short to sweeten its menu

It's good-bye, peanut butter-bacon cupcakes and hello, baked Alaska for Josh Short. The former pastry chef at Buzz Bakery in Alexandria is poised to become the tops sweets maven at the Hay-Adams hotel in Washington Dec. 1.

"I'm heading back to my roots," says the 37-year-old Nebraska native, who helped open the Bellagio in Las Vegas in 1998.

At the Hay-Adams, which includes Lafayette restaurant, he plans to "bring back chocolate and sugar work" and serve the kinds of high-end desserts that his former employer, the busy Neighborhood Restaurant Group, which goes through "a ton of flour and butter a month," didn't typically tackle.

"I could do fancy" work for the NRG's myriad businesses, he recalls, but "everything had to be transportable," since desserts were started at Buzz Bakery and completed by the individual restaurants. The job at the Hay-Adams, he says, will allow him to "slow down and focus."

For his audition for the hotel, Short was asked to make eight kinds of cookies and nine desserts and to create a Thanksgiving-themed pastry buffet. Since his departure from Buzz in September, he's been helping out Occasions caterers in the District.

His future dessert menu will not include the biggest cliché in the trade: "No melting chocolate cake," promises Short.