At Lafayette Bakery, this viral TikTok croissant riff regularly sells up to 1,000 pieces a day! — NEW YORK DESSERTS/Instagram
Manhattan is a bagel city, a pizza city, and ... a croissant city?
Over the last dozen years, ingenious chefs have focused their attention on transforming the classic pastry. Since the days of the Cronut, New York-based bakers have been modifying butter-laminated dough to create everything from Sicilian pizzas to a Dubai-style chocolate bar patisserie.
“To understand the popularity of croissants, you have to follow the butter,” says Gadi Peleg, founder of the New York-based chainlet, Breads Bakery. He sees croissants as both a highly adaptable, blank canvas, and as the ultimate flex, given the technical mastery needed to laminate dough. He also believes the growing availability of artisanal domestic and imported butters makes the pastries an irresistible product for both bakers and their customers.
Even with the rising cost of almost every core croissant ingredient-especially butter, which hit an average of US$5 (RM22) per pound (450g) in September, and most especially imported butter, which tariffs might push even higher-many New York pastry chefs are serving increasingly outrageous interpretations of the crescent-shaped pastry.
Bakers’ response to the higher costs range from being innovative with dough trimmings to raising prices, too. L’Appartement 4F in Brooklyn, which uses the now US$20-per-kilo (RM88) premium Isigny Sainte-Mère butter from Normandy, has had to raise bakery prices by around 3%.
But if there’s one thing inflation can’t spoil, its the timeless appeal of a butter-laced treat. Especially in fantastical shapes and flavors. Over the past few years, TikTok has turned many of these hyper-photogenic, limited-run pastries into viral sensations that beget ridiculous queues.
Ansel is credited with being a trailblazer in terms of igniting the croissant revolution in New York. — DOMINIQUE ANSEL/Instagram
The kickoff
In 2013, Dominique Ansel set off the flaky revolution at his eponymous SoHo bakery with the Cronut; the viral croissant- doughnut hybrid still draws lengthy weekend lines.
Ensuing products - such as the green-striped, meringue-topped key lime pie croissant from Supermoon Bakehouse, the oversize, puck-shaped, cream-filled Suprême from Lafayette Bakery and, more recently, the crispy, caramelized flattened croissant chips from Sweet Grafitti-coupled with the crowd-creating power of social media have helped make New York City a hub for laminated dough innovation.
A French pastry staple, lamination is a technique that involves folding and rolling butter into dough to create delicate, airy layers. Croissants are the most famous example, made from a yeasted dough that incorporates a bit of sugar with all that butter.
Peleg calls Ansel’s Cronut so “genius” that it left many thinking,”Why didn’t I think of that?”
David Zaquine of Sweet Rehab, a French bakery in SoHo says that unconventional croissants keep trending because people crave both nostalgia and innovation. Croissants have an “irresistible” buttery taste, a luxurious texture, and “endless possibilities for reinvention, making them a global obsession.”
When Peleg opened Breads Bakery in 2013, just a few months before Ansel unleashed the Cronut, he introduced a rich and chewy laminated chocolate babka. It’s since inspired copycats, like the one at French-Korean bakery, Lysée, that sells out every weekend.
In 2021, to celebrate the opening of an Upper East Side Breads, Peleg created a croissant-ified black-and-white cookie, with laminated pastry surrounding a chocolate and vanilla shortbread cookie that’s topped with vanilla and chocolate glazes.
The cronut is a croissant-doughnut hybrid introduced by chef Dominique Ansel at his SoHo bakery in 2013. — DOMINIQUE ANSEL/Instagram
TikTok gold
In 2022, Scott Cioe, Lafayette Bakery’s executive pastry chef, struck TikTok gold with the Suprême, a croissant riff that’s baked in a roulade mold then filled with flavoured creams such as the signature Sicilian pistachio.
The result has been daily, sneaker-style drops and hours long lines; Lafayette sells up to 1,000 of the US$10.50 (RM46) spiraled rounds a day. And Cioe now goes through an eye-opening 1,600 pounds (725kg) of butter – the prized, high-fat French butter Échiré-per month to prep his Suprêmes, and the bakery’s laminated dough items.
That same year, the croissant took on one of its more unconventional incarnations when Gautier and Ashley Coiffard introduced US$50 (RM222) boxes of homemade croissant cereal at their pocket-size bakery, L’Appartement 4F. The viral item began as an incentive for investors on Kickstarter.
At New York’s Sweet Rehab, croissant is king. — SWEET REHAB/Instagram
Now croissant creativity is going even further afield. Last fall, the Italian-American Angelina Bakery in NoMad jumped on the Dubai chocolate bar hype train.
Its popular delicacy, which sells for US$8 (RM35), is filled with pistachio butter cream and crisp kataifi, or finely shredded phyllo dough, drizzled with white chocolate and finished with chopped pistachios and more kataifi.
When Zoë Kanan opened her New York-style, Jewish bakery, Elbow Bread, in collaboration with the Court Street Grocers team, she made challah her dough of choice. This “unlocked a new thinking for me in ways to experiment with it,” she says, including making challah with the laminated dough technique.
The most popular result is Elbow Bread’s US$7 (RM31) Honey Bun, which is about 25% butter by weight. (That’s a typical ratio for croissant dough, says Kanan.) She shapes her individual treat into a single strand challah braid and drizzles the top with vanilla honey caramel.
At Sweet Rehab, Zaquine mashes up a fudgy American brownie with a flaky croissant. The resulting brownie flower is made from perfectly intertwined layers of slightly chewy, layered brown and white pastry, wrapped around an addictive molten, custardy chocolate center.
L’Appertement 4F’s homemade croissant cereal took off in a big way when it was first launched. — L’APPERTEMENT 4F/Instagram
Savoury improvisations
And then there are the savory innovations. At Hani’s, the American-style East Village concept from longtime Gramercy Tavern pastry chef Miro Uskokovic, the pigs-in-a-blanket is the most luxe of party snacks. It’s made from a Niman Ranch beef hot dog wrapped in laminated dough with a swipe of spicy mustard and a cap of poppy seeds.
In the Flatiron District, at Time and Tide, the reimagined lobster roll boasts a crisp and delicate croissant bun that shows off its buttery layers; it features on the restaurant’s lunch menu.
Over in Long Island City, Somedays Bakery has recently begun selling the Sicilian pizza croissant. Its a hefty, square-shaped pastry that’s as weighty as a loaded slice, made from laminated dough trimmings that would typically be discarded.
With creamy pockets of seasoned ricotta and marinara sauce and a topping of melted cheddar cheese and basil, it combines the sweet, tangy, salty richness of a classic slice with the ultra-buttery flakiness of a croissant dough.
And if anyone is looking for an expertly made, classic croissant that’s not pretending to be a pizza, Somedays has one of those too. – By KAT ODELL/Bloomberg
