November 13, 2018

As recommended by @sairisn and @foodandfootprints, I bought a cheese danish, plain croissant, and almond croissant, as well as a canalé and baguette. They were all excellent except for baguette which was more like sandwich bread than artisanal bread. @sairisn is right about cheese danish; sugar is restrained to allow the cheese flavor to shine. The croissant had a great flavor too.

This French bakery is not easy to get to if you don’t have a car. I had to walk for about half an hour to get there from the nearest subway station in Queens, but this obstacle is part of what made me want to go there.

f you are a foodie, you’ve probably noticed that hard-to-find restaurants/foods get more press/hype. How does this work? For something (or someone) to be attractive, there has to be an obstacle that gets in between you and that object.

As a thought experiment, think of a French bakery that is perfect in every way, so perfect that nothing gets in the way of you getting it. All the pastries look and taste flawless. Service is on point. There is never a line. Nothing is ever sold out. There is a store every five blocks. And, everything is dirt cheap; we can stuff ourselves with $5. We might get excited about it at first, but we would quickly get bored. We wouldn’t bother raving about it on Instagram.

Groucho Marx summed it up succinctly: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” What makes us want something is an obstacle or some kind of imperfection that gets in the way of getting it. Once this obstacle is removed, you realize you don’t really want it. You wouldn’t want an Oscar if they freely gave it out to everyone. You wouldn’t want to wear Canada Goose if it were cheap and everyone was wearing it—it has already reached that point now.

What this means is that we are literally seduced by struggles, obstacles, and imperfections, which in turn means it’s impossible to get what we want (because as soon as we get it, we wouldn’t want it), or to put it another way, we already have what we want: struggles.

#croissant #almondcroissant #baguette #canale #frenchbakery #queenseats #nycfoodie #nycfood #pastries #bread