Welcome Home -- Where the Pastries Are Divine and the Hospitality Is a Performance Art Piece.
Let me open with an ode: the croissants here are not merely pastries. They are flaky, buttery miracles -- the kind that make you briefly reconsider your life choices and wonder if you've been wasting your mornings everywhere else. The cardamom pastry deserves its own Wikipedia page, possibly a candle in its honor. The sourdough would win awards in cities that actually take bread seriously. I have been a loyal regular, cheerfully handing over roughly twenty dollars a week for these baked wonders, which -- despite being priced as though they were baked by elves in a heritage grain monastery -- are absolutely, defiantly worth it.
And then came the incident.
I stepped up to the counter, a loyal customer flush with goodwill and approximately $14 in pastry intentions, and made what I believed to be a reasonable, even virtuous, request: "Could you please put both pastries in one bag?" My motivation was ecological. Save paper. Small act, clean conscience. A feel-good moment for everyone involved.
Co-owner Isa Steyer regarded me with the expression of someone who had just watched me attempt to mix a Bordeaux with a sports drink.
"The cardamom and croissant," she informed me gravely, "don't go together."
I want to be clear: she was not concerned about flavor contamination, structural pastry integrity, or some ancient baking covenant I'd inadvertently violated. She was concerned about the concept. The philosophy of the bag.
I explained, with the measured calm of a man who simply wants to carry his breakfast home without a doctoral dissertation intervening, that I was going to eat them. Separately. With my own mouth. In the privacy of my own home.
She drew herself up and delivered what I can only describe as a manifesto: "Well -- I'm SERVING them."
Reader, she was protecting the pastries from each other. I had unwittingly stumbled into a sensory conflict that only she could perceive. The croissant, apparently, has feelings. The cardamom, dignity. And together in a paper bag for the eleven-minute walk home? Unthinkable. A scandal. Perhaps illegal in certain cantons.
Funny as this sounds in hindsight -- and believe me, it took a full croissant's worth of cooling down to get there -- it was not amusing in the moment. Ms. Steyer's manner was genuinely condescending, and nothing I said or did had warranted it. I've spent years in the service industry myself. I understand the grind. I understand difficult customers. I was not one of them. Wanting a single bag is not a culinary crime. It is barely even a preference.
There is something quietly absurd about being made to feel like a philistine by your breakfast. And yet -- here we are.
P.S.
I still go. Of course I still go. Do not be naive. I grew up in Germany. My relationship with good bread is not casual -- it is ancestral, almost spiritual, and frankly non-negotiable. The occasional humorless, vaguely territorial moment behind the counter is simply part of the experience now, like paying for parking or waiting for a table. I let it roll off my back. Because the moment that butter croissant hits -- warm, laminated to perfection, shattering at exactly the right angle -- all philosophical disputes evaporate instantly.
That said, I've since learned that my bag incident may be the least of it. There are accounts of Ms. Steyer directing real rudeness at Black and Brown customers -- people from the very community this bakery has planted itself in. That's worth sitting with. This neighborhood has a history that predates the sourdough, the carefully curated aesthetic, and everyone who arrived recently to enjoy both. Businesses that come into historically Black communities don't inherit those streets -- they're guests in them, and should carry themselves accordingly. Artisanal excellence is not a substitute for basic respect, and it certainly isn't a pass. The croissants remain extraordinary. But a bakery is also its owners, and that part deserves scrutiny. Na Mean? read more