A 4 AM stirring courtesy of transpacific jetlag is usually an exercise in quiet misery. But this morning, it handed me a rare privilege: standing at the doors of my local bakery the precise second the deadbolts turned.
This place is a sacred oasis in a vast, soul-crushing ocean of average. Run by a proper French family from Brittany, they do things correctly. It’s the only spot within a fifty-mile radius where you can get genuine, scratch-made puff pastry, actual artisan bread, and patisserie that doesn’t rely on bucket-loads of corn syrup to mask a lack of skill. It’s a singular joy, and frankly, I’d tell you the name and location, but I’m far too selfish to risk the queue getting any longer.
So there I was, picking up the morning’s essential loot—a proper baguette, a quiche with actual structural integrity, a tarte tatin, and a few other fineries—when I had the distinct displeasure of listening to a fellow customer. Standing in a shrine to French baking, this absolute barbarian loudly opined to the counter staff that they really ought to start stocking “double chocolate brownies or double choc-chip cookies.”
Pain au chocolat right there in the display case, mate. Cultural nuance? Zero. Appreciation for culinary balance? Non-existent.
It’s deeply disturbing to witness that level of unrefined ignorance up close. You can get that mass-produced rubbish at literally any generic local bakehouse, or the nearest supermarket for that matter. Yet you walk into a distinctly regional French patisserie, surrounded by centuries of perfected craft, and ask for kiddy food? Peasants.
It struck me that this isn’t just about a bad breakfast order. It’s the exact same disease plaguing our industry. We build sophisticated, highly specialized digital tools and guest environments, only for operators to demand we dumb them down into a generic, lowest-common-denominator “brownie.” We trade elegance, nuance, and mastery for whatever keeps the most uncultivated crowd happy.
Life is so tech. But sometimes, the users are entirely unrefined.
