DREAMING CITY BAKERY

                                                                                                 

A few days ago, a manager at the bakery told me she had a dream: I was giving her directions, and everything I said     was in Haiku. 

Were that it were, that the sound of my giving directions to the staff landed so poetically on their ears [insert laughter here]. 

As it happens, this Haiku episode was the latest in a long line of dreams about working at City Bakery that I've heard dating back to the start of the business, including some of my own dubious dreaming. Back then, when the tarts on the menu were creating a buzz and word of mouth around town, I used to dream about having to make hundreds of them at a time, more than was humanly possible. The dream was vivid: there was a conveyer belt. There were rows and rows of tart shells on that conveyer belt. They all had to be filled. They came at me silently and steadily and they never stopped coming. It was close to terror. I'd bet I had that dream a dozen times, if not a hundred. 

Through the years, there have been some classics. My favorite goes back 14 or 15 years. There was someone named Valentin in the kitchen. He was on the morning baking shift, so his day began at 4:30am. The first thing he made each day was coffee cake [Pear-Cinnamon to be exact]. He woke around 3:30am to get to the bakery on time. He did this for a few years [reliably!]. One day he told me he had this dream: his alarm clock was going off, but instead of making the noise it normally made, it was saying: "COFFEE CAKE. COFFEE CAKE. COFFEE CAKE..."