Saturday, December 30, 2006

A quotidian amount of pastry pain

NYC has a very good bakery called Pain Quotidien --- but the people who wait on you are uniformly stupid and evil. You might even say that it's the Kim's Video of pastry. The other day, I went into the east-side branch to get my wife a French Cream Bun. I asked the guy behind the counter what was inside the bun. "FRENCH CREAM,'' he snarled, pointing at the sign. This cream bun was beautiful to look upon --- two wedges of pastry with a finely sculpted layer of goo inside it --- but when I told the shmuck that my order was to go, he took out a little plastic cup and squashed the pastry inside of it, literally pounding the cup with his fists until the pastry flattened out and spewed its custard-cream guts all over the packaging. It was still edible but looked very bad by the time we brought it home. If you go, bring your own packaging.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

can you recommend a good place in NYC for choux pastry????

cactuseaters said...

how striking that you ask such a thing, Anonymous! My wife figured out how to make choux pastry yesterday (very difficult to make. She used rolled up squares of parchment paper as a pastry bag) By the way, I went back to Pain Quotidian yesterday-- and they were so stupid and rude that I left without buying anything. Enough is enough.

Anonymous said...

Funny you should say that -- I've been having some rudeness problems with that bakery but they make great bread, period (baguettes sell out early)