Hannah Ziskin’s “Slabs” Are the Most Coveted Slices of Cake in Los Angeles

The best slices of cake in Los Angeles are found not at a bakery but behind the counter of a modest-looking pizza spot in Echo Park. But don’t walk into Quarter Sheets expecting pastry chef and co-owner Hannah Ziskin to serve you pedestrian flavors like chocolate, vanilla, or funfetti. Her brick-shaped slices, lovingly referred to as “slabs,” are stacked, layered feats of tender, delicate cake, robust seasonal fruit, and unexpected combinations that might include ginger chiffon cake with puckery yuzu Bavarian cream and blackberry-Lambrusco jam, or polenta olive oil chiffon with a tangy crème fraîche Chantilly cream and rose-geranium preserves. Ziskin’s desserts are meticulously crafted, but they’re playful, too: Take the slab known as Gâteau Dirt, which features a light cocoa chiffon, dark chocolate Bavarian cream, jammy roasted black cherries, and salted dark chocolate sablé cookies crumbled with candied citrus peel strips for “worms.” It was inspired by a favorite of elementary school kids everywhere: dirt cups.

Ziskin’s cakes are a brand name in Los Angeles, spoken of in the same way someone might talk about a Gucci belt or an Hermès bag. I regularly receive texts saying a new slab has dropped when a new flavor combination is posted on the restaurant’s Instagram feed, as if it’s a rare sneaker. Her desserts at the restaurant are so popular that diners should plan to reserve a slab as soon as they sit down — it’s the only way to guarantee there will be one available when it’s time for dessert.

While she might operate out of the back of a pizza restaurant with an extremely laid back vibe (and a prominent photograph of a very phallic shrimp tower front and center in the dining room), Ziskin’s resume is anything but. Her first kitchen job was staging in the pastry kitchen at Chez Panisse — a gig she took up while attending college at University of California, Berkeley. Ziskin had written a paper on California cuisine and chef Alice Waters. “And then I was like, ‘Wait, it’s, like, right there. Hang on.’” A lifelong hobby baker, Ziskin wrote a letter to the restaurant asking to work there and was quickly thrown into the deep end. “In a lot of ways, that was culinary school for me. It dictated a lot about the way I look at building a menu and using produce and seasonality,” she says.

From the moment she set foot in Chez Panisse, Ziskin was hooked on being a pastry chef, with zero desire to ever be on the other side. “I’m very sensitive to heat — not to sound like a princess about it — but I do not want to work on a hot line,” she says sheepishly. She is deeply inspired by the ingredients coming out of the savory side of a kitchen, however. “My palate leans very savory. I’m heavily influenced by [savory cooking] way more than I am influenced by other things that are happening around the world in pastry.” It’s why the smooth marzipan that adorns her ultra-popular princess cake is not afraid of being a bit salty. Or why most of her desserts are made with ingredients like labneh, bay leaf, and verbena. (Occasionally, Ziskin does make a true savory item, like the restaurant’s housemade feta that often accompanies a plate of beans).

After college, Ziskin jumped to the kitchen at Quince, where she worked as a pastry production cook for a few years before moving on to Bar Tartine in its heyday in 2014. After a few gigs and bouts of travel, Ziskin took over the pastry program at Nopa. “I had my little team, and I did that restaurant menu and this [intense] brunch,” she recalls. “We were doing like 500 covers a day. They let me hone my skill set and find my voice there.”

Three years later, Ziskin and her partner, Aaron Lindell (the talented chef behind the extremely good pizza at Quarter Sheets, and her fellow co-owner), moved to L.A. in pursuit of growth and square footage. Ziskin put together the pastry program at the fine-dining restaurant M. Georgina, but 2020 and the onset of the pandemic had different plans for her. She started baking out of her house, turning out loaves of bread, her now-famous cakes, lots of pies, and plenty of cookies. “I’d be in three KitchenAids at once,” she recalls. “Aaron’s baking the pizzas at the same time, and he’s like, 10 timers running, the smoke alarms going off. I’d have five Dutch ovens going at a time in our standard home oven, to bake bread.” It ended up being a testing ground for what would eventually become the brick-and-mortar location of Quarter Sheets in 2022.

Now that the restaurant is in its second year of business, Ziskin is starting to think about what a second restaurant might look like. She misses doing more bakery-oriented things like breads and viennoiserie. “While Quarter Sheets is a pizza shop that has good desserts, I think that what makes sense for the next thing is a bakery that has great pizza.”