Walking home from my shift at Little Egg—the restaurant where I work—I pass the new location of Radio Bakery. It’s 1 p.m. on a Friday, and the line snakes down the block. The people in it wait patiently, spiritually fortified by the knowledge that, in eighteen to thirty-five minutes, they’ll hold the laminated pastry they’ve been ogling online. I wonder if they have jobs. I wonder if the custard-stuffed croissants are worth it. Then again, maybe the wait is the point.
I used to line up like that. When I first moved to New York, I waited seventy minutes in punishing winds for a “milk and cookie shot.” I tracked soufflé pancakes and cereal milk soft serve across boroughs, queuing outside bakeries for their 11 a.m. doughnut drops. Dessert was fantasy, anticipation, pursuit. I’m no stranger to courting virality: I built an online following by sharing close-up shots of pastries paired with depressive captions. Once, I posted a raspberry lemon panna cotta molded to look like a brownstone and watched thousands of likes pour in; it felt like I was having a religious experience. Now, I make pastries for a living. I wake up too early, rotate the menu reluctantly, and taste for quality control, not enjoyment. I’ve fallen out of love with bakeries. Mostly, I scroll.
Online, I’m returned to the frenzy, which has, in the six years that I’ve lived in New York, become a full blown epidemic. TikTokers guide their followers to the latest hot spots like they’re prophets. Croissant cubes are cracked open like gender reveals. People foam at the mouth for laminated dough. I take pleasure in scorning them, in playing the lapsed believer, but the truth is I ogle too. Most of the pastries look delicious; they spew creams and drip shiny glazes, but I can’t tell if they’re actually good or just algorithmically optimized. I watch an influencer tear into a mango sticky rice mochi spiral with a genuine look of joy. I start to wonder how I became so cynical. I start to wonder, again, what virality tastes like.
I decide on an experiment. I re-download TikTok. It’ll be a week of faith. A viral pastry a day. I wonder if I’ll be inspired or disgusted. Maybe I’ll fall in love with dessert again. Maybe I’ll discover what people are hungry for.
On Friday after my shift, I head to Salswee in Flatiron. They’re famous for their mini mousse cakes which masquerade as whole fruits. I expect the cold rain to deter the masses, but I am wrong. By the time I have actually entered the establishment, pushing open the baguette-shaped door handles, most of the fruits are gone. I procure the final apple, a pear, and a “black sesame puff square.” Total: $28.85.
The apple I eat in-house. I see a TikToker being filmed by her friend. She leans down and bites directly into it, like she’s in a pie-eating contest. I do the same. Past the waxy glazed outside, tangy compote spills out like innards, mixing with a layer of barely sweetened cream. The taste is not unpleasant, but the mouthfeel is strange: the entire pastry is so cold it makes my teeth hurt, and the outer shell leaves a film on my tongue. The to-go box has a warning that the pastries must be consumed within an hour, but even so, as I head to the subway, I open the pear and find that it hasn’t survived the walk and is now soup in a box. I watch a TikTok review: “You don’t expect something this pretty to taste this good.” On to the puff square. In contrast to the shocking miniaturization of the fruit pastries, the cube of dough is so massive I don’t understand how a human mouth is expected to engage with it. I chew on the edges like a mouse. I don’t taste sesame.
On the second day I enlist my friend Alex Jung to accompany me. He was New York Mag’s Diner at Large before the column went defunct. He has a discerning palate. We hit Lafayette Bakery. I’m surprised there’s no line given the millions of views that the spherical croissants command on TikTok. We get a strawberry olive oil special, and a pistachio one. Total: $27.76. The pastries are surprisingly flaky. The pistachio one is overly sweet, but the olive oil is floral and savory. I try to film the cream oozing and it’s very NC-17.
We head to Papa d’Amour, which is Dominique Ansel’s latest venture: a hybrid French-Asian bakery. The line is long, but we are offered yuzu lemonade while we wait. It’s tart and refreshing, and my hopes skyrocket. We get to the front and order. First, a 3-D printed “jam jar” made of white chocolate, which the menu instructs us to “slice in half to reveal the molten center.” Inside, mango coulis, coconut milk tapioca, rice pudding ganache. It’s like four desserts stuffed into one but none live up to their promise. Then, a “hot and cold red bean butter croissant”: a flaccid undercooked dough fashioned into the shape of a croissant with a sliver of red bean and a slab of unsalted butter. “This is an east meets west fusion hate crime,” Alex says. Behind us, a 2-top is diving into a “matcha iced souffle,” a beverage with a dramatic cap of souffle-style foam. The man looks confused. I ask him how it is, wondering whether we should get one. He is radiating disappointment but he feigns diplomacy. “I think I had a disproportionate idea of how good it was,” he says. “I saw it on social media, so I was excited. It tastes like sweet scrambled eggs.” Then he grits his teeth. “I like it.” I think about how everyday we drift further from God’s plan.
We’re feeling spiritually bereft after Papa d’Amour, so we return to the original Father—the OG of viral pastries—Dominique Ansel Bakery. Both of us remember the cronut as a kind of revelation. There’s still a line fifty people deep. A weathered sign outlines the “cronut(™) pastry etiquette,” including keeping your voices down, and not holding spots for friends or cutting others in line. Inside it’s 2015 again; a “keep calm and cronut on” sign hangs over us. We get the milk and cookie shot and the cronut of the month: salted caramel popcorn. The shot is not as good as I remembered: the cookie gets soggy too fast, rendering the pastry structurally unsound, and the milk inside is overly sweet. But the cronut is perfection, delicately fried, layers of buttery lamination, salty from the oozing custard and caramel.
I am developing a theory. To make a viral pastry, there are a few strategies. You might manipulate the shape in a satisfying way—bastardized croissants sell online when they are transformed into immaculate cubes or glossy spheres. It’s pastry as architectural feat, cookie as cup. Trompe-l’oeil always titillates. The second variable is hybridization. A croissant but make it carbonara. A bananas foster cinnamon roll. A crookie. Two pastries for the price of one, for at least the illusion of value. Dominique Ansel was the first to do this, cross-breeding the croissant and doughnut, and now the recipe for success has mutated. I think of French bulldogs that can no longer breathe. Of stone fruits genetically fused. Virality tastes like a mash-up so distorted you can no longer remember what the original components were supposed to taste like. On the subway ride home, I think about the bakers behind the pastries. I wonder if their pastries are designed for virality, or if they’re just an intuitive response to what people seem to want. I wonder if they ever feel trapped by their own confections. I begin to imagine making my own.
On Saturday, Instagram informs me that Radio Bakery is doing a princess cake croissant. A combination ripe for virality. I am filled with a sense of alarm: I am stuck in a basement kitchen piping choux dough and I won’t make it in time for the 10 a.m. drop. I implore my boyfriend to go join the line. A saint, he is there by 9:50, but by 10:43, when he actually steps foot inside, they are regretfully sold out. They are also sold out of the french onion soup croissant. He texts me, thoughtfully, that he has procured a cheesy pretzel bearclaw.
Usually when I pass the Radio Bakery line, which is at least seventy people long, I think to myself: Things have gotten out of hand. But today, I notice the sweetness of the scene—dogs and small children on their parents’ backs, people chatting, laughing, enjoying their weekends together. At home, the bear claw is delicious. I prefer it to its progenitors.
I try more pastries. Collaborations are a big thing now—mash-ups between brands and people. Caffè Panna is sold out of its red velvet ice cream by the time I get there, but I manage to snag a frutti di bosco sundae, an ice cream parfait that’s perfectly balanced and not too sweet. I meet a food influencer known as The Carboholic at Sunday Morning, famous for its viral cinnamon rolls. We go on a Monday and I’m nervous that nothing will be left by 1 p.m., but she assures me they’ll hold some for us. When I arrive, we are inundated with buns. She tells me about a ritual she has with her sister. “Let’s go fooding today,” she says. “It means we walk around and eat food. It’s a social activity.”
I walk home. Somewhere over the Brooklyn Bridge, I am surprised to realize how nice the past few days have been. It felt good to have destinations, to wander around this city I’d started to take for granted; Even if the pastries weren’t great, it was fun to eviscerate them with other people in real time. This is the new activity, I realize, and what else do New Yorkers have? It’s cheaper than a sit-down meal, and just as shareable. Suddenly, I feel optimistic: Virality, for all its grotesquery, is also a kind of collective clarity, an objective measure of appeal and maybe deliciousness. Virality, for all of its absurdity, still gets people out of their apartments. I think about how it’s probably a good thing that we parlay our digital addiction into real world experiences. Outside it’s sunny after a long week of rain. I decide that when I get home, I’ll make my own viral pastry. It doesn’t seem that hard; there’s a formula. I’ll crossbreed, I’ll cube. How about… Mexican hot chocolate churro lava cake cubes. Limited drop. It will be available for purchase at Little Egg this weekend. You should probably get in line now.