Hello! We made it to another Wednesday. It’s a short week here in the States, so I’ve compiled a list of reading links for today’s newsletter. For those of you off enjoying the holiday, I hope your weekend is full of rest and good food. My plans involve picking up some cupcakes in Puerto Rican-inspired flavors from Brooklyn Cupcake for a Fourth of July party and drinking lots of wine at the beach in New Jersey. Happy Independence Day, America!
Since I launched Sweet City, I’ve noticed an increasing amount of dessert-related coverage in critic’s columns around the country. I love to see it, I really do. I think it speaks to the moment we’re living in — a voracious and insatiable appetite for pastries. In a recent Grub Street piece, the influencer Mike Chau got it exactly right when he chalked bakery mania up to its approachability. It’s so much easier to feel a part of our food-obsessed culture with a $10 bakery purchase than an impossible-to-book, expensive, or overwrought meal.
Here are some examples of big platform critics getting into the dessert critic role:
New York Magazine’s new critic Matthew Schneier likes what he eats at Frenchette Bakery at The Whitney, from French brasserie hit-makers, and Balthazar alums, Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson.
A review of Sweet Rabbit Bakery in Chicago, which critic Louisa Kung Liu Chu describes as a “French, American and Asian contemplation on grains,” and a bakery, “exploring borders both global and personal.” Sold!
This isn’t as new — the New Yorker has always had its pen on the pulse of dining culture — but here’s Hannah Goldfield on ALF Bakery, one of my favorite bakeries in New York.
I launched Sweet City with a few pre-published stories, including an essay introducing myself and how I go to this point. Now seems like a good time to resurface that piece, plus a few other recent newsletters I’m particularly fond of.
A condensed summary of how I got from Michelin to self-publishing on Substack. I feel another one of these brewing…maybe a bts essay soon?
I wrote about cute, kawaii desserts and curated a roundup of actually good kawaii sweets in NYC. I’ve come across some new ones, so this might need an addendum. [PAYWALL]
Have you ever been on a dessert train? It’s not at all what it sounds like, but you should definitely take a ride.
Red velvet cake is the signature dessert of Juneteenth, but you can red velvet anything. [PAYWALL]
Finally, I’ll leave you with another trivia question, but this time I want to raise the stakes. I will comp a one-month subscription to Sweet City to the first comment that answers this question correctly: What was the name of my first blog?1
The clue is that the answer lies in one of the links from this newsletter. Shouldn’t be hard to figure out which one…
A note to my family: please refrain from participating as you are all already on my comp list!
I’m so glad Brooklyn Cupcake is still around! I was just thinking about them.
Omg yum, must drop by Brooklyn Cupcake next time I'm in Williamsburg! And your first blog was Eating the Big Apple!