The Tastemakers (6 page)

The elephant in the room is that at some point the mania for cupcakes will subside and the market won't be able to support an increasing number of dedicated cupcakeries. The public's interest in the trend will move on to donuts, some say, or maybe a pie revival, and many cupcake shops will either close or branch out to serve more products. “I, too, wonder how sustainable it is,” said the Crumbs executive. “Is it a short-lived trend and something you can sustain and build a business out of this? We grapple with that as well. It's the million-dollar question.” Or, in Crumb's case, a multimillion-dollar one.

The media had been calling the end of cupcake fever since the trend began. Joel Stein, writing in
Time
, called them a “sickness” in 2006, and
Vanity Fair
, in a 2009 essay on the epidemic of cute in America, likened eating cupcakes to sitting on your couch in a Snuggie while gazing at photos of kittens online (though cupcakes are still served at the
Vanity Fair
Oscar party). Business writers predicted the cupcake trend would implode as it grew, like Krispy Kreme donuts had a decade earlier. “In America, bubbles form because any good business idea gets funded a dozen times over,” wrote Daniel Gross in
Slate
back in 2009. “That's the American way. Cupcakes are now showing every sign of going through the bubble cycle. The first-movers get buzz and revenues, gain critical mass, and start to expand rapidly. This inspires less-well-capitalized second- and third-movers, who believe there's room enough for them, and encourages established firms in a related industry to jump in.” The recession would right this, Gross predicted, as people traded down for more affordable options. Others searched for the “next cupcake,” holding up whoopie pies, macarons, and cake pops as the rightful dessert salvation. Instead, the opposite happened. Cupcakes only
grew further. The recession swelled the ranks of cupcake bakeries (led by newly unemployed professionals) and eaters. Cake pops and whoopie pies flashed in the pan. Each time someone predicted that cupcakes had jumped the shark, they were forced to eat their words as cupcakes rose to new heights.

I'm not immune to cupcake fatigue. Where I was once excited about a cupcake shop opening in my neighborhood, I now shake my head and sigh when yet another pops up nearby. Two years ago I moved into a new house, and a few weeks before, the nearest business to us, a hair salon, had transformed into a cupcake bakery called Le Dolci. On our first night in the house a friend brought us a box of their cupcakes in flavors like s'mores and key lime. The icing took up half the weight of the cupcake, and the designs were overly elaborate—one had chocolate cake, embedded chocolate icing, another layer of icing frosting the cake, itself covered in chocolate sauce swirls, topped off with a chunk of brownie as though it was created for some chocolate industry–sponsored bake sale. It wasn't a cupcake, that delicious, sinful treat of my youth, but rather a Cupcake, the very evocation of this global trend that had turned baked goods into an arms race of cuteness, sacrificing the subtlety of taste for an onslaught of gimmickry and sugar, the boy band of desserts. When I heard a few months later that a cupcake martini bar was opening in Toronto, with sweet alcoholic drinks garnished with your choice of minicupcakes, I prayed for the rapture to arrive and drown this wretched trend in a cleansing lake of fire.

Perhaps it will come to pass. On April 17, 2013, as I sat in Georgetown Cupcake eating a cherry blossom specimen (vanilla with real cherries, and a glob of cream cheese–cherry icing), having just come from the nearby Sprinkles, where I tried a selection of minis and nearly broke my tooth on their trademarked fondant dots, my brother e-mailed me an article that the
Wall Street Journal
had just posted, titled, “Forget Gold, the Gourmet Cupcake Market Is Crashing.” Crumbs had posted significant earnings downgrades for fiscal year 2012, and their stock plunged 34 percent in one day, down to $1.70 from a high of $13 a share in 2011. The chain would scale back its aggressive expansion plans, and other cupcake
bakeries were quoted as saying that sales were declining. That night in DC I went to my friend Gail's house for dinner, and her son Zachary, who had just turned six that day, asked to be excused from the table to go play with his new Lego set. “Okay, Zachary, you can still have a cupcake for dessert,” my friend offered, and Zachary, to our collective shock, said he didn't want one. A six-year-old was tired of cupcakes. Surely this was the cupcake's death knell.

Not so, said the cupcakers, including Alison Robicelli, owner of an eponymous bakery known for its cupcakes. In a swift and damning blog post responding to the Crumbs news, she carefully dissected and refuted the cupcake Cassandras's arguments with in-depth economic and social commentary. “Know why cupcakes aren't going anywhere?” Robicelli wrote. “Because you need something to be ‘the next cupcake' just like you need something to be ‘the new black.' It's not a bubble; it's a genre—individually portioned dessert. You can talk about feminism, and
Sex and the City
, and nostalgia all you want; it comes down to the fact that just about everyone on earth likes cake. Not rocket science.”

Steve Abrams at Magnolia echoed those sentiments when I'd asked him about the trend's limits. “You have a food media that's all fucking pissed off that they haven't killed the cupcake,” he said. “By the time I bought this business it was no longer a craze in my mind,” said Abrams, noting that Magnolia's business is evenly split between cupcakes and their other baked goods. “In a hundred years from now there'll still be a brownie troop that needs a fund-raiser, and they won't be baking macarons … or fondue.”

Eventually cupcake fever will break. Some cupcakeries and overextended chains will close or shrink, but their legacy will continue on in commerce and culture. Cupcakes arguably created what has been called the “single-focus premium-indulgence” retail market, a mouthful of industry jargon that basically means small treats people will pay more money for. They have paved the way for every artisanal donut shop, grilled cheese pop-up, and slider miniburger that has come along since the mid-1990s. Starbucks didn't create the cappuccino and latte, and the chain reached its pinnacle in 2008, before the recession forced them to close thousands of stores. But
the trend Starbucks fostered with coffee-drinking behavior, in the way Magnolia did with the cupcake, fundamentally changed the coffee market around the world, creating demand for high-end coffee products in places where low-budget instant coffee once was king. Now you find small independent “third wave” latte art shops around the corner from your home and push-button espresso machines in every single restaurant. Joel Stein, he of the snide cupcake remarks in
Time
, told me the cupcake has now become the “default American dessert” like pie was a century ago.

As for the cupcake itself, I believe it will slowly revert to the kid-friendly birthday treat I recall from my youth, which is its logical end. “Cupcakes are cheaper to buy and cheaper to bake,” said my cousin Caroline Davis, whose Toronto bakery, Two Moms, has practically cornered the city's kosher cupcake market, especially at schools. (Okay, disclosure time: she also made cupcakes for my wedding, and I was delighted to have them.) The cupcake's advantage remains central to its form: it costs less than regular cake, requires no cutlery to serve or eat, can be customized for groups (a dozen vanilla, a dozen red velvet, two nut-free, two dairy-free, etc.), and they look great. “I like cupcakes,” said Davis, who had recently visited Georgetown Cupcake with her kids on a trip to DC, “but I just don't understand this craze. I mean, I wouldn't want to wait in line for one.” The cupcake trend, for all its fireworks and sex appeal, was merely the symptom of the cupcake's inherent perfection and familiarity, something I knew from the first time I ate one, and this is why it was able to grow so wide and large. But transforming something as familiar and fun as a cupcake into a trend was one thing. What I wanted to find out was how someone could cultivate a food trend from the ground up, starting with an idea, a patch of dirt, and a seed for a food that almost no one had ever tasted.

P
arking is not an easy feat in Charleston's historic downtown, and no one knows that better than Glenn Roberts, who has a story to tell about each spot he passes. One is in front of a building that belonged to his old friend, now dead, and another spot is in front of one of his first houses here, back when this upscale area was a mixture of eccentric bohemians, conservative members of South Carolina's grand families, and the African American workers whose culture they all drew from. “Oh hell, let's just park here and hope the guard is asleep in the booth,” Roberts said, pulling into a private lot. “We aren't going to be more than an hour anyway.” Roberts peeled his long body out of the car and went around to the trunk.

Though Roberts is in his mid-sixties, his Dennis the Menace–worthy flop of silver hair, faded jeans, and heavy work boots makes him look like a much younger man. He speaks in a booming voice that quickly fills any space he occupies with a mixture of personal tales (“I once drove mangoes cross-country in a big rig through here!”), arcane local history, and a passionate diatribe for what he loves, which is the traditional food of the Deep South and America. Roberts is a first-rate adventurer and wanderer, the type of all-American man they once sent to space, not because he was a physicist but because he'd jump on a missile and ride that bastard
just for the hell of it. He is a Californian with feet in New York and his heart firmly in the South, and in the world of American food he is a legend both for his outsized personality and the fruits of his carefully wrought labor, which I came down to Charleston to experience firsthand.

Digging around the trunk, Roberts eventually found what he was looking for: a large Ziploc bag filled with four pounds of ink-black rice. In fact, the rice in Roberts's hand was IAC600, also known as China Black, a variety he had worked for close to a decade to bring to the culinary market in the United States and was on the brink of releasing for the first time to a select few tastemakers. Ten pounds of this year's test crop had been set aside to give to the chefs in Robert's orbit, regular customers of his heritage grains company, Anson Mills. The four pounds in his hand, two-fifths of his entire available yield, were destined to enter the hands of Sean Brock, one of America's hottest chefs and a leader of South Carolina's modern low-country cuisine. The China Black rice was so scarce that Roberts valued its worth at $500 a pound, almost half the price of France's coveted black Périgord truffles, the so-called black diamond of the food world.

“Okay,” Roberts said, slamming the trunk with a big grin. “Let's go bribe a chef.”

We walked around the corner and down a cobblestone alleyway to the entrance of McCrady's, the city's most renowned restaurant. Originally a tavern where George Washington used to drink (and steal across the alley to an adjacent bordello, according to Roberts), the stately dining room, nestled under brick arches, had become the center of a southern food revival ever since Sean Brock took over the kitchen in 2006. A native of rural Virginia, Brock was raised growing and cooking almost all of his family's food. He built his kitchens around a dedicated commitment to farm-to-table cuisine, with an emphasis on traditional southern ingredients (many of which he raises on his nearby farm, including grains, vegetables, and pigs) and a mixture of time-honored cooking techniques (at McCrady's, he has cooked by a wood-fired hearth, and he pickles, cans, and preserves extensively) as well as modern (he'll employ molecular
tools like emulsifying agents and dehydrators). In 2010 Brock won a James Beard Award as the best chef in the Southeast, the same year he opened Husk, a more casual, increasingly southern-focused restaurant in Charleston that many publications, including
Food & Wine
, have since named the best restaurant in America.

When we came in Brock was standing behind the bar, talking to a couple of Swedish journalists. He was dressed in a Black Sabbath T-shirt and “Virginia is for Lovers” trucker's hat and had an impressive full-color arm tattoo depicting a multitude of southern vegetables.

“Hey Glenn,” the soft-spoken Brock said, sticking out his hand. “What have you brought me today?”

“This is China Black,” Roberts said, ceremoniously holding up the baggie, like a drug dealer would, before dropping it onto the counter in front of Brock. “In China there are tons of entries about how it used to be a tribute rice for emperors. White rice was something anyone could eat, but black rice was so coveted that it was used to pay tax.”

“Man, it's gorgeous,” Brock said, dipping his fingers in and pulling out a few dozen grains, which he examined in his open palm. “I can't wait to cook it.”

“Me, too,” Roberts said, “but this is almost half of all that exists in the world right now, and it's worth a lot of money.” He paused a second, for dramatic effect. “Tell you what. I'm going to give this to you, but only if you promise to cook some of it for David and me tonight.” Roberts smiled knowingly, and Brock just smiled back.