I asked Alissa what she wanted to do when she came to visit on a solo trip, her first time in New York in a few years. I hadn’t seen her in person in nearly two years. But to her credit, she’s always made a great effort to keep our friendship in mind, as if the thousands of miles between us are a mere blip. There are texts and phone calls and cat videos, all of which make me feel like our faces our in each others’ faces even when they’re not.
I sometimes don’t know what I have to offer my friends who are mothers, when my life seems so much smaller in comparison to creating and forming and protecting a life. But in the last few months, I think the thing I have learned that I can offer the most is time and space to remember their lives as [insert name here] rather than as only Mommy. Being Mommy is all-consuming, and [name] needs time to breathe, too.
So when Alissa said the words “bakery crawl,” I immediately began sending her Instagram posts from different bakeries in the city. As the algorithm would have it, soon my Discover page was filled with the roundest, most glazed buns; cupcakes topped with the frothiest puffs of frosting; slices of cake so high I wondered how a single person eats such a thing. If she wanted to do a bakery crawl, we would do a bakery crawl. How much time does a mother of young children get time to sit and eat a pastry in a cafe, unencumbered by time? I decided I would try to give her as much as possible, space to eat pastries and be herself. I remembered when she arrived that we had been friends for 20 years as of this very summer and told her.
“We haven’t been friends for 20 years, we met in 2005!” she said.
“I have some bad news for you,” I said.
And we laughed.
We decided our tour would be East Village-centric, and we began at Win Son (they now have a Manhattan location, joyfully) for scallion pancakes and that tangy, spicy sauce I would dip my life into if I had the opportunity. I think of the way Chris puts Frank’s Red Hot on everything and that’s what I would do with this Win Son sauce, flavor profiles be damned.
Our next stop was one of my favorite spots for flaky treats, Librae on 3rd Avenue. While I’m hardly a person who waits on line for food, least of all one that snakes out a door, Librae—“New York’s first Bahraini-owned bakery…influenced by flavors from the Middle East using fermentation techniques from Copenhagen”—is one of the few places that lives up to the hype. Plus, the line typically moves pretty fast (plus it doesn’t really snake out the door mid-morning on a Friday; the weekend is another story). In my somewhat limited pastry travels across the city, I do have a more savory proclivity (I really enjoy their savory scones and za’atar morning buns) but we decided we’d share everything and I wanted Alissa to have everything she desired. We ended up at Librae sharing a gorgeous, creamy, sweet and fresh tomato-corn construction, perfect for the end of summer, and their pistachio rose croissant. They’re famous for the latter in particular, among other treats, but I had never tried it.
It was the start of Labor Day weekend, and we sat outside. The last gasps of summer warmth were in the air but it was miraculously not too hot, as if Alissa had flown the Pacific Northwest in with her when she arrived. Constructed like a croissant sandwich, topped and filled with candied pistachios and a sort of magic rose-inflected coating, we split it. It was green and magenta and a rainbow of buttery browns. I still remember its flakes and salty flecks and subtle sweetness, its airy layers and nutty crunch. I also remember how there was nothing left but a few flicks of buttery laminate resting on white wax paper when we were done. It was so good I went back to get Chris one later just because I wanted him to experience it–not just try it–too.
As many people do, I have a relationship to food that extends into a desire to have an experience. It doesn’t have to be rocket science, it’s more about filling my senses with something fabulous, a little escape from the day-to-day of crowded subway rides and pimples and broken nails and all the other annoyances that are…well, not so fabulous. I wonder if that’s how other people feel, too, where even for a few minutes or for a few dollars you get to feel somewhere else. I love to share that with other people, to let them escape, too. And that can also take the form of a museum, or a gallery, an essay. In this case, it is a pistachio-rose croissant. Sharing this croissant with Alissa feels like a way of saying all the things I don’t know how to on a regular basis, that you are important to me, that you deserve happiness and freedom and relaxation and I love you. But sometimes I don’t know how to say all of that, so what I say instead is here, I gave you the bigger half.