Off the Menu #02 — Life after Croissant

Croissant week, day three, and I have become a butter logistics company that happens to run a restaurant.

Monday morning I called the dairy supplier and doubled the order. He laughed. Then I read him the number and he went quiet in the way people go quiet when they're doing math. By Wednesday the walk-in looked like a butter vault, and the croissants still weren't surviving the day.

Because at dinner we're doing something I would have arrested myself for a month ago: splitting them, filling them, saucing them, sending them out as dessert. A man ordered one after a steak last night and looked at me like I'd performed a small miracle. Sir. It's pastry and filling. Calm down.

And every morning at seven, my sous-chef stands outside in the cold with a tray of croissants and little to-go coffees, flagging down commuters like a very polite croissant toll booth. Forty a day, free. The lunch line has noticed. The accountant has noticed. I have told the accountant to look at the lunch line.

FOOD FACT

The oldest bread ever found wasn't baked by farmers — it was baked by hunter-gatherers, about 14,400 years ago, in a stone fireplace at a site called Shubayqa 1 in northeastern Jordan. Archaeologists found the charred crumbs in 2018 and published the find in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It looked nothing like a baguette: an unleavened flatbread, closer to a pita or a wrap, made from wild barley, einkorn, and oats ground into flour — plus tubers from an aquatic plant. Bread is at least 4,000 years older than agriculture itself.

THE CLUE

Yesterday I caught one of my cooks reading the book. My book — the basement book, third shelf, behind the water heater. He was just standing there in the dry storage, turning pages like it was a novel. No smoke. No century-hopping. No blister on his thumb. He looked up, said "cool book, chef," and went back to portioning.

I haven't stopped thinking about it.