What is the internet doing to croissants?

With all eyes on Paris today, maybe it’s time to admit social media has taken this too far.

My favorite croissant comes from Du Pain et Des Idées, a well-known boulangerie in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. I last had one on my 40th birthday, seated under the awning, my second-born toddler on my lap. I had to brush flaky crumbs from her hair as I ate. She had to brush flaky crumbs from her own lap, after devouring a croissant of her own. Years before that birthday I used the croissant in an ad-hoc social media pregnancy announcement to demonstrate the current size of our (first) unborn baby. I am a fan.

That's me, before I became a mother and then well after; beloved croissants remain unchanged

This particular croissant is dense and buttery, a little rustic, completely delicious. I think about it a lot, especially when I see what the not-so-humble croissant has become… at least on the internet. 

I guess I’m what you’d call a croissant purist, a sentiment I was happy to see reflected in the New York Times earlier this month. Tejal Rao captures it better than I do: 

The plain croissant is not, at a glance, thrilling. It doesn’t have the whirling geometry of a Suprême croissant or the show-off shell of some just-gone-viral hybrid, which knows from which angle it wants to be photographed. It is not dramatically constricted, uniformly shaped, caramelized or colored. The plain croissant wasn’t made for the camera.

We’re more than a decade beyond the dawn of the cronut, the croissant-donut hybrid credited to French pastry chef Dominique Ansel.

When Ansel debuted the cronut at his SoHo, Manhattan bakery in 2013, the crowds followed. The pastry was so popular, Ansel had to limit how many a person could buy. Eager diners even paid people to stand in line on their behalf to get the goods. The cronut is the first high-profile, internet-viral croissant mashup I can remember, its photogenic beauty captured via iPhone pics and boosted a still-young Instagram, catapulting it into pastry legend. 

If you have an Instagram account and even a fleeting interest in food, you’ve probably noticed this is happening again. Maybe it never stopped. 

Call it a ‘croissanissance.’ 

I can’t take credit for the term; a journalist friend coined it over drinks one evening as we searched for a word to describe this moment in viral laminated pastry. We were discussing the “flat croissant” sold by a Los Angeles bakery: Day-old pastries are smashed flat and fried in butter, which gives them, I’m embarrassed to admit, an oddly pleasing, almost cartoonish appearance. 

“As a former pastry chef,” said another friend across the table, “I would cry if I had to flatten all of that hard work.” 

I don’t like to yuck anyone’s yum, but that’s challenging in the face of increasingly ridiculous viral food items… obscene Bloody Marys, milkshakes that require two hands to enjoy, “unicorn” everything.

Not every viral croissant hybrid — and there are plenty, seriously — seems to be a shameless attention-hog. But they keep coming. In the last two weeks, for example, I’ve learned about the croissant loaf and the croissant dog. I’d line up for one of those. (But not the other.) 

Will Instagram-viral food peak? Has it peaked? Are we still doing this?

The National Restaurant Association identified viral food as its top trend for 2024. In the right hands, they say, social media trends can land on the menu and bring valuable attention to a restaurant. But the quest for virality begets stunts, like the $72 fried rice from a San Francisco Vietnamese restaurant called Lily. Its popularity surprised and then angered its chef, who took it off the menu. When that happened, then-critic Soleil Ho at the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: 

“It seems counterintuitive for a small, independent restaurant like Lily to take off a menu item that’s gone viral — to run through the carnival ripping down the banners while people are still trying to enter the gates. “ 

In this case, the restaurant said the dish, which wasn’t Vietnamese, was never meant to outshine the rest of the menu — even if virality was the early goal. (The restaurant brought the dish back later, charging almost seven times the price, this time for charity. Smart move.)

It’s hard to imagine we’ll stop sharing food photos on social media. I probably won’t. But will we continue to allow ourselves to be influenced by creations meant for sharing (online) first, eating second?

I’ve been thinking about croissants because I’ve been counting down to the Paris Olympics. But then I read stories of impossible commutes and confusing rules as the city prepares for the games, and can’t help think about what outsized attention can do to the things — and places — that we love. 

It reminds me of a great essay by Rebecca Jennings in Vox in 2022. Jennings’s piece is about travel, not food or this current croissanissance, but I think it captures the right vibe: 

The problem of travel at this particular moment is not too many people traveling in general, it is too many people wanting to experience the exact same thing because they all went to the same websites and read the same reviews. It’s created the idea that if you do not go to this specific bar or stay in this exact neighborhood, all the money and time you spent on being here has been wasted, and you have settled for something that is not as perfect as it could have been.

What else?

• In an expected ruling, California’s Supreme Court upheld the contentious Proposition 22. Delivery and rideshare drivers for apps like DoorDash and Uber can be classified as contractors, the state’s highest court says, capping years of challenges in the state over a contentious ballot measure that enshrined gig worker status in law. — New York Times

• Chipotle is willing to spend $50 million to avoid any further viral debate about its portion sizes. After a negative review from a TikTok star called out the chain for inconsistent portions devolved into chaos for Chipotle, its CEO went on national television to tell customers that filming Chipotle employees won’t result in bigger portion sizes. Now, the company’s chief financial officer says management is encouraging employees to err on the side of generosity if they’re unsure about the right amount of food to serve. Plus, the chain will spend tens of millions of dollars to make sure staff is trained properly — that’s two full scoops of rice, four ounces of meat. (Not unrelated: Chipotle has invested heavily in a back-of-house automated make line that produces burrito bowls and could probably make this problem go away.) — Bloomberg News

• CrowdStrike sent clients partners and teammates $10 in Uber Eats credit after last week’s huge software crash, but then Uber canceled the codes. A CrowdStrike spokesperson says the codes were, apparently, used too frequently. — TechCrunch

*Expedite mistakenly read “partners” as “clients” before re-reporting this news; a CrowdStrike rep said that the codes were not sent to clients, but given to “partners and teammates who may have been helping customers” during last week’s outage. I regret the error, and I also regret that the terms “partner” and “client” are often used interchangeably.