In late winter last year, Maria Kitsopoulos, a member of the New York Philharmonic since 1996, arrived for rehearsal with a cello slung over her back and a Rubbermaid container in hand. Inside, she had tucked little squares of homemade cheesecake, the delicious filling held together by two layers of puff pastry. “Musicians love free food,” she told me. “They see that box and they come running.”
He made sure the first pieces went to the stage manager and stagehands. (“They’re the ones looking for your cushions,” he said.) Then, just before going onstage, he handed the last few squares to a guest assistant director, Gustavo Dudamel, the Venezuelan superstar with a halo of dark curls. who, in 2009, took over the Los Angeles Philharmonic and has led it to glory ever since.
Recipe: Sopapilla Cheesecake Bars
She didn’t know if her little offering would languish in a dresser. But at the end of the concert later that night, after the exciting run to the end of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony and with the audience roaring, Dudamel turned to the cello section, gave it a thumbs up, and mouthed: “Great cheesecake”.
He apparently never forgot it. In February, news broke that Dudamel—a singular figure exalted in the insular world of classical music and adored by the public, and even with his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—would become music director and performance of the New York Philharmonic in 2026. (Trumpets blast!) As reported in The New York Times, when Dudamel returned to Lincoln Center to meet his colleagues to be, told Kitsopoulos that his cheesecake was a big factor in his decision to cross the continent.
Surely the powers that be at the Philharmonic had assembled many temptations in their campaign to lure Dudamel away from the West Coast. But in the end, was it a humble cheesecake that tipped the scales? I contacted my daughter’s cello teacher, Wolfram Koessel, a member of the American String Quartet who plays regularly with the Philharmonic. “Have you heard of this cheesecake?” I sent a text
Dudamel turned to the cello section and mouthed, ‘Excellent cheesecake.’
Immediately the phone rang. It turned out that Kitsopoulos was a close friend of Koessel’s and made the same cheesecake six years ago when they were playing a festival in Vail, Colorado. He didn’t forget either. Even though Kitsopoulos accidentally burned it—”the altitude,” she said with a sigh when I asked her later—Koessel’s daughter, then 8, still insists it’s the best cheesecake she’s ever had.
What kind of cheesecake resists burning and triumphs, etching itself into the memory of children and world wise men alike? The ingredient list is short: for the filling, just cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla extract. And the bark isn’t coaxed or smoothly styled. It comes from a can: crescent-shaped dough, which hops with a twist (“it’s so much fun to open it,” Kitsopoulos said), unfolds, becomes fluffy when baked and is somehow precisely engineered to evoke purity. rich and milky from fattier butter (even if the dough may contain shortening instead).
Unknowingly, Kitsopoulos, who grew up in New Jersey, had stumbled upon a Southwestern tradition: a mix of cheesecake and sopapillas, chunks of dough that were dipped in hot oil until they turned into pillows and often served sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and dripping with honey. The origins of sopapillas, also spelled sopaipillas, can be traced to Latin America (the word is believed to derive from Mozarabic, a medieval Arabic-Spanish vernacular) and regions of the United States that were once part of Mexico. In 2003, Texas briefly proclaimed sopaipilla its official state cake (along with strudel) and “a much-savored part of the shared Texan cultural identity.” “Sopapilla cheesecake” was the most Googled dish during Thanksgiving week in Texas and Oklahoma from 2004 to 2013. Oklahoma State University even features a recipe on its website, one of seemingly countless online. .
Kitsopoulos took a recipe from Pillsbury, developed by Deborah Harroun, the writer of the Taste and Tell blog. The cellist made some adjustments: a little less sugar and a lot more cinnamon. Baking, like music, demands discipline and precision, but in the kitchen, Kitsopoulos is the least fussy of bakers, approximating rather than measuring. Where Pillsbury advises first rolling out the dough for the topping on parchment paper, she simply drops it. “I’m not such an exact person,” she said, laughing. “I’m flying by the seat of my pants. Sometimes I forget that I have something in the oven.
In December, when the young Finnish teacher Klaus Mäkelä came to town—“he looks exactly like my son,” he said—he gave him brownies. “He had eight of them,” she recalled with wonder. “I don’t think they give guest directors enough food.”
Recipe: Sopapilla Cheesecake Bars
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