MY TAKE ON THE [POSSIBLE] MAST BROTHERS CHOCOLATE SCANDAL

TURN UP AHEAD

How I experienced shopping the new Agata & Valentina market in the Village, above. Its the food store with the floor plan that really wants you to go where they want you to go. A strange affair, though it was nice to get in touch with my inner mammal while I was there. I wonder if they're selling a lot of cheese.

DREAMING, AGAIN

A week ago, I posted about a long history of work-related dreams by those who work or have worked at City Bakery through the years. Yesterday, Liz Devito, who works the counter at City Bakery, told me she had a dream that was all bad energy. I asked if she'd share the details with me, which she did, generously. Here are the gory details in her own words:

In my dream last night, I was somewhere that was “City Bakery” although it wasn’t the real City Bakery. I think I might have actually been in some vague outdoor location. You hustled over to me and exclaimed something like “Liz, guess what. You’re FIRED,” in an extremely worked-up manner. The reasoning was that I had posted something on my Facebook page about meeting a celebrity while working at City Bakery, and you were furious that I hadn’t respected the privacy of said celeb by posting their whereabouts on the internet. Or something. (I wonder if this is because I had a conversation about cell phones with Paul Giamatti a couple days earlier and then proceeded to let everyone know?) But you were extremely upset with me, and when I asked if you were sure you really wanted to fire me, you were adamant. I remember feeling guilty, upset, and utterly panicked. I distinctly remember thinking, “oh no! Now I’ll have to find another job, and I really like this one!” I was scared that I’d have to work at some other bakery that didn’t live up to City Bakery (because really, how could it?) in order to pay the rent. Oh, yes – the RENT was also a significant stressor in this dream. The best part is that it all felt so real, it actually took me a moment upon waking up to comprehend that I hadn’t really been fired. Waking up with those stressful feelings wasn’t pleasant, but figuring out that I still had a job was a tremendous relief. It was like that “Hallelujah!” moment when you think it’s Monday all day until someone lets you know that it’s actually Friday. Except it was Saturday, and it was 6am, and I needed to be at the bakery by 8. Which was fine by me, because at that moment I was pretty darn happy to be employed!

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..."

GOOD RIDDANCE

I passed by Lafayette French Pastry in the West Village yesterday and was happy to see for myself - the front gate locked - the fate this place deserved for years.

This bakery was the second iteration of a once appealing neighborhood shop on Bleecker near Seventh Avenue. The first location was stocked with "Napoleons" and eclairs and presented a tempting front window in the heart of the Village. It was cramped and a little disheveled, but the pastries were good, in a food time when good was good enough. The original Lafayette French Pastry was the father. This most recent location, the son. It moved to Greenwich Avenue near 10th Street more than a decade ago, and what a long way down in one generation.




It would be nice to talk about the baking when talking bakeries, but the second Lafayette French Pasty forced a change of subject. In January 2009, Ted Kefalinos, the baker, the son, made a disgrace of himself and the business his father began with an act of unvarnished racism: he made grotesque-looking chocolate-covered pastries and put them on sale as "Drunken Negro Cookies." He made clear that his creation reflected his feelings on the recent election of Barack Obama. It created a stir, presumably just as the baker wanted.

It's a shame the place wasn't shut then and there, and I've been amazed it hung in this long. Like a wounded creature being put out of its misery, U.S. Marshalls seized the shop Tuesday.

In a curious piece of media on the story, Robert Sietsema of The Village Voice, after recounting in detail the infamy of the racist episode, waxes nostalgic:

"Nevertheless, as a vestige of the old West Village with all its French and beatnik pretensions, it will be missed, a place worth looking in the window of from time to time, but almost never entered."

"....it will be missed...?!"

I'm sorry, that's too generous. I'm all for nostalgia about Greenwich Village storefronts of yesteryear, but not this one. Lafayette French Pastry won't be missed, nor should it be. It betrayed the ideal of a neighborhood bakery and was a pariah in its community. Good in every possible way that its gone.

Whoever takes over the space should buy a big sprig of dried sage and walk around in circles to get rid of the karma in that place. 

THE STARBUCKS DEAL

Starbucks.

A bakery.  

$100 Million. 

Now that's a recipe. 

Three weeks to the day since Starbucks dropped $100 million to buy La Boulange, a local San Francisco bakery, that number still swirls round my mind. On Wall Street, where Starbucks lives, this was perhaps just another deal. Down here on the ground in bakery land, this deal is one for the ages.

Local retail bakeries don't get bought for a hundred million dollars. In the land of local bakeries, bakers think about the price of butter, not valuation. Bakers don't cash out, they crap out. After years of the daily routine, joints tire, then slow, all while a corporate suitor is not standing by with a check to go comfortably into the sunset. The bakery business is a deceptive one, a challenge that doesn't quite meet the eye. After all, how hard can it be to mix flour and water into a morsel of goodness and sell it for $3? Truth be told, you can't imagine. Most local bakeries lurch along through months then years, if that long. I read recently that the average operating profit for retail bakeries nationally is 3.5% [don't spend it all in one place!]. Reality for small retail bakeries is squirrelling away cash from one holiday season to the next, while wishing someone would invent more holidays. Year after year, even with growth, the small bakery life is a relentless economic grind that defies the sweet, tempting look of all those pastries in the bakery case. Against this reality, $100 million in a bakery deal is epic, and La Boulange is now officially the Instagram of the bakery world. 

It may be more accurate to say La Boulange wasn't exactly just another neighborhood bakery. It had a man [a private equity firm invested in 2006] and a plan [19 stores today with 25 more planned next year]. Still, being purchased by Starbucks for $100 million in cash is pixie dust to 99% of bakers who have ever baked in all of baking time. Tell a baker that Wall St. is standing by with a hundred million payday, then watch them fall backwards into their 60-quart Hobart mixer with cartoon stars circling above their head. 

$100 Million. I wonder [because someone should be] if this deal is about Starbucks and Starbucks only [in that  Starbucks could afford $100 million to try to end its longtime practice of selling universally-recognized terrible food]. Or, more compelling, is there meaning in this deal beyond Starbucks? Does the purchase of a local bakery for $100 million signal a new day of speculative opportunity for Main Street bakeries? Did a dozen or so better bakeries around the country just become more valuable in the tailwind of this transaction? Is there about to be a bakery boom? [followed by a bakery bubble?]. If so, who are the bakeries, who are the buyers, and what might any of it be worth? 

Meantime, what about the baking in this bakery deal? While reading about the goals of the Starbucks-La Boulange partnership, a number other than $100 million comes to my mind: two, as in two hours. La Boulange is a classic French patisserie, so I assume it will be a short time only before Starbucks customers begin enjoying croissant, n'est pas? The challenge with that: a great croissant has about a two-hour window from the moment it comes from the oven, if we're serious about a great croissant. At four hours, the sun is setting. After that, you're the proud owner of an artifact of a croissant. Bon Appetit! 

Many years ago, when Starbucks first moved into New York City, they asked if City Bakery would consider being a supplier of baked goods. I was completely interested, until I learned the required delivery schedule: orders needed to ship to a central location by 6pm to be sold the next day. In our bakery, then as now, we bake every thirty minutes all morning long. The goal is to have pastry on our counter that was in the oven within the hour when bought. For Starbucks, we would need to have baked 15-18 hours before the fact. 

Assuming La Boulange produces a great croissant, how will they get them to 11,000 Starbucks everyday on a timetable that says quality? [I'm assuming retrofitting 11,000 Starbucks with ovens is not possible given lease considerations]. Operationally, this will need a Marshall Plan-like approach. Great croissant, God bless 'em, have non-negotiable physical properties and know not of hundred million dollar acquisitions.  

I'm not rooting for or against, I just can't wait to see how this unfolds. With $100 million already spent, will it cost Starbucks tens of millions more to actually get the quality they seek into customer's hands?  

GRADING DOH LETTER GRADES

From an Op-Ed in yesterday's Times, this should be required reading for Mayor Bloomberg and everyone at
the NYC Department of Health. Excerpt below is the tip of a damning iceberg.

Along with researchers at New York University, Stanford and Yale law schools, I have studied data from more than 500,000 inspections of more than 100,000 restaurants from the last few years in nine jurisdictions: Austin, Tex.; Catawba County, N.C.; Chicago; El Paso; Florida; Louisville, Ky.; New York City; San Diego; and Seattle. Our research examined the process for tallying violations and the consistency of inspections across repeat, unannounced visits to the same restaurant. In a critical dimension, New York performed the worst of the nine. 

The full piece, here.