At Laurel Bakery, What’s Old is New
Amidst a flurry of new bakeries doing the most with laminated dough, Laurel leans into well-made classics.
There’s a new trend in laminated Viennoiserie in New York City’s bakeries. It’s not the cartoonish 2D flattened croissants, nor is it the 3D triangular pastries that look like Japanese onigiri. It’s a pastry called pain Suisse and you can find it in bakery cases at stalwarts like La Cabra or big name newcomers like Laurel Bakery in Brooklyn, the subject of today’s review.
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Pain Suisse can be made with a puffy brioche-style dough, but the version I’ve seen consists of tightly laminated croissant dough folded around pastry cream and chocolate chips. It’s not actually new, the pastry is as old as laminated dough itself, probably, but bakeries in New York have only recently wizened up to its sleek appearance and relative deliciousness (it’s a better chocolate-to-pastry ratio than regular pain au chocolate, in my opinion).
At Laurel, the pain Suisse is about as trendy as it gets. Here, the bread and pastries are a traditional selection of classic French bakery goods. No 2D or 3D sleights in sight. But just because Laurel is resting on the, well, laurels of French bread baking and Viennoiserie, doesn’t mean they don’t still carry all the hits.
Laurel opened in April in what is technically the Columbia Street Waterfront District in Brooklyn, but passes for part of Cobble Hill. It is the latest project from Steve Wong, Nico Russell, and Piper Kristensen of Redwood Hospitality.
The bakery’s pastry case, modestly embedded into the counter, often contains an escargot, the spiralized, swirly flaky pastry that resembles the shell of an actual escargot (snail, in French). I first got wind of this pastry around 2019, when the pistachio escargot from Parisian bakery Du Pain et des Idées was living on my Instagram feed, rent free. It was the thing you had to get when you were in Paris, unless of course the bakery was closed, as it was when I was last there.
Anyway, I imagine that the escargot at Du Pain et des Idées shares a similar DNA with the one at Laurel, which was impressively lightweight and rendered to a nice, buttery crispness. The filling was savory instead of the more ubiquitous raisin or chocolate, a potent mash of green garlic and Cantal cheese that bubbled up in the oven to form a pronounced tangy crust. In this case, the dough, which was very good as I’ll get to below, was more a vehicle for the flavors of cooked allium and cheese.
I didn’t make it to Du Pain et des Idées in Paris, but I did have one of the best croissants of my life at Blé Sucré on that trip. There’s something inexplicable about good lamination that makes a dough crisp and tender at the same time. This, too, is what the croissant at Laurel was like. It didn’t flake unnecessarily; it wasn’t weeping with butterfat. The taste was yeasty and sweet, the product of a long, cold fermentation and proof, which the bakers at Laurel accomplish over the course of about 30 hours. If I were making a list of croissants worth seeking out in New York, this would be one of them (along with Le Fournil and ALF Bakery).
A tangent, if I may: The croissant at Laurel has the straight form that tapers at the ends, French-style. The crescent-shaped croissant is traditionally Viennese, a commemorative remnant of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Battle of Vienna in 1683. (The crescent moon is a symbol of Islam.)
But the star of Laurel’s pastry case, in my opinion, is the kouign-amann, a pastry from Brittany that calls for sugar-crusted laminated dough to be scrunched into muffin tin-like baking trays. The sugar granules melt and caramelize into something spectacular while the butter works its magic on the fine layers of dough and, eventually, your arteries.
Just so you know, my gold standard kouign-amann is from b. patisserie in San Francisco. In my Michelin era, I traveled to San Francisco often and would spend off-hours between lunch and dinner at b. patisserie. I didn’t need the extra calories; I just couldn’t resist the pastry.
At Laurel, a sheet of caramelized sugar hugged the kouign-amann’s bottom. And because the dough had a yeasty accent like the croissants, these pastries had a wonderfully toasted and buttered bread flavor.
Super tangent, if I may again: Before my maternity leave at Michelin, I knew I would be taking a break from traveling, so we had a friend send us b. patisserie pastries via suitcase express, which we stored in the freezer for any post-partum cravings. They didn’t really keep, but the point is that I loved these…a lot. If we had Laurel back then, I wouldn’t have needed to worry about all that.
Things seem to be going well for Redwood Hospitality, which once just operated a restaurant in Brooklyn called Oxalis, but in 2022 expanded to include the wine bar Place de Fêtes (they were early to the wine bar trend). Most recently, Oxalis closed and morphed into an all-day café called Mado where you can get pastries and sandwiches built on bread from the ovens at Laurel. Oxalis should be reincarnated again in Brooklyn soon.
Nico Russell, the executive chef of Redwood Hospitality, though not the baker, has a solidly French culinary background, having cooked at Michelin-starred restaurants like Chez TJ in Mountain View and Daniel here in New York. It’s no surprise, then, that Laurel takes after a neighborhood boulangerie in the 11th arrondissement. The design is modern but simple, even a bit Scandi, and the deep-green color runs through the exterior of the building to the paper bags you get to take home in case you, like me, order too much.
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Craig Escalante is the head baker at Laurel. He may be new to the Redwood team, having joined in February before the opening, but he is an old hand in New York City kitchens. His experiences include bread-centric stints at SCRATCHbread, Bien Cuit, and even Sadelle’s. Escalante’s work at the bakery recently included slender baguettes, boules of crusty sourdough, and puffy focaccia made from organic grains and a Japanese ferment called amazake.
As we’re in the thick of summer, Escalante finds inspiration in the season’s bounty — sweet strawberries crowned a recent Danish while a cheery lemon curd filled a recent kouign-amann. A buttery speculoos roll filled with repurposed spice bread (toasted and ground into a chunky paste) instead of the usual spice cookies offered a whiff of the holidays ahead, perhaps a preview of what is to come as the bakery continues to settle into its Brooklyn home.
There isn’t anywhere to sit inside, which makes the place seem a bit like a commissary kitchen for the restaurants, and the few outdoor seats seem to be perennially occupied. On a recent visit, I took my ham and butter baguette sandwich to Brooklyn Bridge Park instead (sandwiches are set out at 11). While the crust was a touch chewier than I would have liked, it was split and slathered with cultured butter and stuffed with good, salty ham. The sourdough I took home impressed with a rightly tangy crust and a nice alveoli spread. It was perfect for a toast, a sandwich, a passing nibble.
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Since Laurel opened, we’ve seen not less than five new bakeries open across New York. In a city bursting at the seams with buttery pastries, what makes one worth visiting over another? Sometimes, it’s the thrill of discovering something new. But in this case, at Laurel, it’s the thrill of discovering something old, done exceptionally well.
Laurel Bakery
115 Columbia St
Brooklyn, NY 11231
(347) 308-1030
Wed – Mon (with Tuesdays coming soon, per social media)
curious how early you had to get there. i've tried to get a sandwich and they were sold out of them, and everything else ofc, by 11:30
What a joy to read!!! Adding Laurel to my list!