Chicago Sun Times The sweet smell of dessert success April 18, 2003 BY PAT BRUNO

Sometime last year, I ate a fried Twinkie for dessert. I was winding up a meal in a fine-dining restaurant and a fried Twinkie was one of the dessert choices. I ordered it. Why, you ask? I honestly don't know. Maybe I was just plain fed up with what restaurants were coming up with for desserts these days. I figured if I had to put away one more small, round chocolate cake with a liquid chocolate center, I would go bananas. Chicago is the Twinkie capital of the world (invented here in 1933 by Continental Baking, the same people who brought us Wonder Bread), so why not the Twinkie? Indeed. It was pretty awful. The least the restaurant could have done was gussy that baby up a bit. Maybe sluice it with a caramel sauce, stack some sauteed bananas around it (the original Twinkie had a banana filling). Some whipped cream.

My tongue-in-cheek rant here is relative to one of the last impressions (coffee aside) a restaurant leaves us with--dessert. Recent developments in the realm of desserts over the past year have given me hope, sugar-coated my thoughts about the state of sweets, the pleasures of creams (whipped or not) and the divineness of chocolate. This all came to me (can I evoke a Proustian madeleine moment here?) while enjoying a few of the sweet treats at the Julius Meinl cafe (3601 N. Southport, 773-868-1857). This Viennese cafe is a class act all the way. If I owned a restaurant, I would be carting stuff out of this place by the truckload.

Meinl's Millennium torte (glazed with apricot jam and chocolate ganache), topfenstrudel (farmer's and cream cheese with golden raisins in a flaky crust) and apfelstrudel (apples, golden raisins, cinnamon, flaky crust) are just a few examples of the sweet delights here. And the whipped cream served with some of these desserts (the apple strudel) is so real you would want to use it for, well, you figure it out.