The Tastemakers (44 page)

I picked up one of the long fondue forks, speared a cube of bread, and coated it with the cheese. Because I had burnt my mouth eating fondue too eagerly with Dietmar Schlüter several months back, I paused to give it a cooling puff. The cheese was smooth, almost like a cream sauce, with the strong flavor of garlic and herbs that you would expect from a pasta. This wasn't the powerful, gooey Swiss fondues I'd grown up eating; this was something more subtle, modern, and inventive. I dipped in a slice of summer sausage, and suddenly it was deeper and earthier, the herbaceous fondue now brightening up the smoky sausage, then with the apple, which made it seem tart and fresh. “Careful,” Schaibly warned me as I went for my tenth bite in the first minute, “fondue is a marathon, not a sprint. If you don't slow down, you'll never get through the meal.” Had I known what was coming next, I would have heeded his advice. Martin exchanged our cheese fondue for an empty pot filled halfway with oil. As the pot slowly came to life with a series of pops and pings, he set down a buffet of raw food: fat prawns and slices of deep red
tuna, a platter of fresh vegetables, bowls of sauces and batters, and at least two pounds of meat, including Angus sirloin, Cajun-spiced chicken breast, and big cubes of beef filet. Schaibly showed me how to stuff a mushroom cap with creamy green-goddess dressing, dip it in thick tempura batter, and set it in the oil to brown.

As the oil danced around our skewers in a lawn sprinkler's hiss, we waited and talked about fondue's ultimate impact in our food culture. The Melting Pot was an exception to the fondue trend's general fortunes, growing as fondue had faded, but the legacy that fondue had left in its wake was all around us, melted right into the way we ate. Schaibly saw fondue in several lasting food trends, from chocolate-dipped fruits and cookies to our eager embrace of warm dips and melted sauces for all sorts of dishes. Sure, it wasn't fondue in the Swiss classic sense, but wasn't something like the molten chocolate cake just a variation on the chocolate fondue? Weren't all the melted cheese–filled entrees in our culture just cheese fondues on the inside?

For the better part of an hour Schaibly and I sat there skewering and frying, eating and joking. We talked about our families, about work, travel, and, in Schaibly's case, the finer points of shooting an angry alligator in the head with a high-powered pistol (Florida, baby!). I'd barely known the man for a day, but with each skewer the barrier of unfamiliarity between us fell away, and I felt like we had been good friends for years. (A year later, Schaibly moved on from the Melting Pot to another job. He finally broke free of his fondue cage, perhaps bringing the promise of melted cheese creations to a whole new audience.) It made me think back to something Erwin Herger had told me the day before when we sat with his wife, eating separate plates of fish on the other side of the state. “The strength of fondue is the idea that everyone participates in eating or cooking from the same pot,” he said. “It somehow creates a unity at the table.” Fondue's fundamental strength, the core of what made it a trend, was the central idea of a shared eating experience. It occupied the same place as a giant banana split, something you ate for the dynamic it created with people at the table as much as for the taste. Whether it was melted cheese, boiling oil, or chocolate, fondue was
just the vehicle toward the ultimate goal of conversation and familiarity, and no matter what the fads of the day were, whether low-fat or low-carb, frozen or Greek yogurt, small plates or big entrées, the pleasure we got from sharing food with other people would never diminish. It was a trend that would always reemerge in various forms but that fundamentally could never go out of style. “That's what the name of fondue means: it's melting,” said Herger, looking off across the water in the direction of his native Switzerland and, perhaps, the first kiss he stole from a girl who dropped her bread into the fondue many years ago. “It's melting people together.”

Perhaps I was being a little bit cheesy, but wasn't that the whole point?

O
n May 10, 2013, as I sat at home writing the cupcake chapter that opens this book, a new food trend was being born three hundred miles away. That was the day Dominique Ansel, a Parisian-born, New York–based pastry chef who had worked in the kitchens of star chef Daniel Boulud, debuted a new confection at his Dominique Ansel Bakery in the fashionable SOHO neighborhood of Manhattan. Ansel's creation began with a laminated dough, similar to the buttery, layered, proofed dough of a croissant. He shaped this into a ring, then fried it in grapeseed oil so that the dough puffed up crisp and golden on the outside, creating airy pockets between the flaky layers, which now peeled away in sheets. Ansel then piped in Tahitian vanilla cream so the thing practically bulged, rolled it in flavored sugar, and topped it all with a hot-pink rose-flavored glaze, which was sprinkled with rose sugar for added effect. Ansel named his new pastry the cronut, a croissant-donut hybrid. The cronut was extremely delicate, limited in number, and expensive ($5 each). You couldn't refrigerate a cronut, and it basically wilted like a flower after six hours, but its promise of novel decadence and deliciousness proved irresistible.

Because the popular food blog Grub Street had posted an article about the cronut the day before its official debut, its existence
wasn't exactly a secret. But the public's response to the cronut was more than anything Ansel or anyone who has ever witnessed a food trend could have imagined. New Yorkers had been searching for an heir to the cupcake trend for years, and fancy donuts had been their rising contender, but this took the momentum of both and blew it up like a cream-filled hydrogen bomb. That first day Ansel and his staff sold out of their first batch of cronuts within half an hour of opening their doors, then scrambled to make more and immediately sold off the day's second batch. Dozens of people were frantically calling Dominique Ansel Bakery, trying to secure orders.
FoxNews.com
carried a story about the cronut's invention that day, and over the following week cronuts went from an unknown culinary creation to a feverish trend in record time. Food journalists looking to write reviews began heading to Ansel's bakery before opening, waiting in line in the early morning hours to score a batch. To try to control the madness, Ansel limited shoppers to a maximum of two cronuts per person. This only increased demand. Each day cronuts sold out quicker than the previous day. On May 15 someone gave one of Ansel's staff the middle finger when they were informed, upon reaching the end of the line, that the cronuts were already gone. Another person broke into actual tears of despair. On May 17 Ansel trademarked the word Cronut™.

It only got crazier from there. Within a week there were lineups for cronuts winding around the blocks near Dominique Ansel Bakery at all hours of the day, with the first eager customers showing up as early as five in the morning. Summer interns from businesses all over New York were dispatched to sweat it out in the line so their bosses could be presented cronuts at their desks. Enterprising Craigslist entrepreneurs began offering to wait in the cronut line on your behalf for a fee. A month after the cronut launched, a black market service called Premium Cronut Delivery opened for business, charging $100 to bring a single cronut anywhere in New York City (a 2,000 percent markup). If you wanted twenty cronuts, it cost $3,000 because larger orders required multiple rounds in line, the opposite of an economy of scale. Each day the cronut lineup formed a few minutes earlier, by August inching as early as three in the
morning. The blog Gothamist even posted a photo of two young women rooting through the bakery's trash late at night, searching for rejected, overcooked, degenerate cronuts to eat or possibly even resell. Their desperation was tragic.

The shocking thing about the cronut trend was its sheer blitzkrieg speed. No one predicted its arrival, and no one had ever seen anything like this. It ushered in a new era of instant food trends. In the span of a month cronuts received the combined press coverage that the cupcake craze accumulated over a decade, with articles in every major national and international newspaper and website, TV news broadcasts all over the world, and a relentless onslaught of social media attention.
Vogue
magazine declared 2013 the summer of the cronut, the
Atlantic
called them “New York's favorite cruller on vanilla-flavored steroids,” and cronut stories appeared on the Freakonomics blog as well as in the business magazine
Inc
., questioning the long-term financial potential of the pastry's future. Cronut blogs, like
funkincronuts.com
, popped up to chronicle every minute development of the craze.

The cronut was unique because it was the first time a food had been born directly into a trend. Whereas cupcakes took one or two years to move out from Magnolia's kitchen into other New York bakeries, several more years to inspire cupcakeries in other American cities, and almost a decade to establish the cupcake trend internationally, the cronut emerged from Dominique Ansel's kitchen and leaped directly into the world of imitators, hybrids, and inspired pastry creations popping up as far afield as San Diego (the square cronut), London (the dosant), Singapore (crodos), and even Caracas, Venezuela (@MrCronut), to name but a few. All over the world pastry chefs were reverse engineering cronuts as the trend spilled from one country to the next. A bakery in Beijing reportedly got the idea from one in Australia, which had flown someone to New York to acquire a specimen in the same way that someone in Manila had done. In South Korea the country's Dunkin Donuts chain had already mass produced a “New York Pie Donut” by late July.

Few if any of these people had even tasted a cronut or even seen one up close, but the lessons of the cupcake trend were clear: get in
early, catch the wave, and ride it for every dollar you can. I first encountered this early in July when Le Dolci, the bakery at the end of my block in Toronto specializing in cupcakes, macarons, and other sweets, began advertising cronuts on their chalkboard. They were smaller than Ansel's and more dense, but they were fried and flaky, and suddenly there were crowds of curious foodies taking photographs on my street with cronuts triumphantly displayed. Even after a year spent writing about food trends, this one amazed me.

As impressed as I was with the cronut trend, I only managed to observe it peripherally because my wife gave birth to our first child ten days after the cronut was born in Ansel's bakery. All summer long I saw the stories and Tweets and jokes about the cronut. People I knew were heading to New York for vacations and spending half their weekend in line for cronuts, which they chronicled as slideshows of photographs on social media. The cronut trend's sheer absurdity began to overtake reality. Karon Liu, a friend and fellow food writer at the Toronto newspaper
The Grid
, wrote an article about the potential of a crookie (croissant + cookie), almost as a piece of satire. To his surprise, the crookie instantly became a creation sold by bakeries in the city and then around the world, officially endorsed by the folks at Oreo, and covered in
Time
.

I was too stuck in a cycle of sleep deprivation, feeding schedules, colicky screams, and sheer parental joy to pay any real attention to all of this. I couldn't even manage to walk to the end of my block to buy a cronut before they sold out each day, despite regular promises to do so. In fact, my knee-jerk reaction to the cronut was a sign of how hard it was to shake the ambivalence I held toward food trends when I began this book. Each time a new cronut story came to my attention, each time someone excitedly asked whether I had already tried one, I groaned, as I once had for cupcakes, gluten-free diets, and restaurants that served bacon-flavored desserts. “It's just another fad,” I said dismissively. “It'll be gone by Labor Day.”

By mid-August my curiosity got the better of me, and I was finally ready to embrace the cronut. I marked a date in my calendar—the date my first draft of this book was due—when I planned on walking down the street to Le Dolci to pick one up, partly as a
reward and partly as a fittingly delicious conclusion to my research. As my deadline approached, the excitement around Le Dolci's cronut reached fever pitch. The bakery had teamed up with a vendor called Epic Burgers and Waffles, which operated a booth at the Canadian National Exhibition (a giant end of summer carnival) that sold gut-busting creations like a waffle and fried chicken sandwich or a hamburger set between two halves of a Krispy Kreme donut. Together they unleashed the Cronut Burger, a seven thousand–calorie bomb that replaced donuts with a cronut, quickly becoming a media sensation and generating its own vast lines and celebrity status. The cronut was now in such hot demand that I was worried I wouldn't ever be able to get my hands on one.

On the day of my cronut appointment I woke up, checked Le Dolci's hours, and counted down the time until they were open. At eleven in the morning I strapped my daughter to my chest in her sling, put on my sunglasses, and strode confidently down the block. When I arrived at Le Dolci, however, the bakery was closed. I checked the time, peeked inside, and then turned to my phone, where I looked at my e-mails for the first time in a few hours, discovering only then why I would not be getting a cronut that day: a wave of violent food poisoning had affected over two hundred people who had eaten the Cronut Burger the previous night, sending several to the hospital. Both Le Dolci and Epic Burgers and Waffles were closed, pending an investigation by the city's health authority. Over the coming week it would be revealed that the culprit was neither the cronut nor the hamburgers but rather a maple-bacon jam Le Dolci had created as a topping for the monstrous sandwich that had been contaminated with the Staphylococcus aureus toxin. Le Dolci had fallen victim to the hubris of a food trend and had taken the cronut down with them. The bakery had opened the previous year, chasing the cupcake and macaron trends long after they had passed, and when the cronut came along, they were the first on the ground to offer it in Toronto. Drunk with the taste of a food trend's power, they sought to amplify their success and chased too many food trends at one time, combining the cronut, burger, and bacon trends into a hideous frankentrend that ultimately destroyed them—before Labor Day, no less.