Thursday morning, 3 a.m.: The alarm clock sounds and the Baker rises. He’s showered and dressed by 3:40, out the door of his Capitol Hill apartment by 10 minutes to 4. He walks the few blocks to his workplace at the corner of Olive and Howell briskly but without hurry. The Baker walks this way almost everywhere. He doesn’t own a car, doesn’t want to.
Absent the daytime warmth of Indian summer, the dark night air is sharp and cold, the city streets mostly vacant. Not counting the woman tossing newspapers out of the passenger-side window of her Toyota sedan, the reasons for a normal person to be functioning at this hour are dubious—usually desolation or desperation. The Baker is at ease in this temporal netherworld. Not comfortable in it—nothing outside a bed is comfortable at this hour—but present in its remove. He knows exactly what he’s doing here.
Shortly after 4 a.m., the Baker, Neil Robertson, 47 years old, slim and fastidious in sleek, clear-plastic-framed glasses, close-cropped hair and trim salt-and-pepper beard, opens the door to Crumble & Flake. He steps inside his bakery—a spartan space with grey concrete floors, sparkling white walls, and big, front-facing windows—and turns on the lights. He is alone in his world, exactly how he likes to be. As not-night yields to actual morning, Robertson puts into motion the alchemical forces of chemistry and combustion that will produce today’s goods. (...)
There’s a European proverb that goes something like “The baker is the only honest man in the kitchen.” It applies professionally—bakers can’t hide flaws under sauce or searing—as well as personally. Bakers are, generally speaking, of a kind.
“Very few friends, very little social life,” is how Robertson says he copes with the unconventional hours that his profession demands. “I’ve always been a loner.”
Neil Robertson is certainly an original. He was a graphic designer for almost two decades before switching careers 10 years ago. He studied pastry production in Chicago, baked professionally in Las Vegas at the Bellagio and then back in Seattle at Canlis. He opened Crumble & Flake eight months ago to immediate acclaim and long lines of people hoping for a taste of his pastry.
But he’s also an archetype: sober, meticulous, obsessed with perfection. (He spent seven years developing his chocolate chip recipe.) He describes himself not as an artist but a craftsman, less interested in self-expression than consistency. Contrast that with the rock star pretension of the restaurant chef, tattooed and willful and possessing big ideas about Food with a capital F.
“I’m not a badass. I’ll never be a badass. I’m a baker,” Robertson says. “I don’t aspire to fame or, you know, big awards. If I can look at my case and all the baking is done and say to myself, ‘Yeah, I made that. I’m proud of that. Dammit, it’s good stuff’—that gives me deep, deep satisfaction.”
Across the city at Café Besalu, James Miller exhibits some of the same characteristics—the innate perfectionism, the quiet pride. (Probably coincidence, but he also sports snazzy, plastic-framed glasses and short hair.)
“Bakers are the humble side of the kitchen,” Miller says. “Cooks are like the lead singer, bakers are more like the rhythm section.” As for the off-hours, “If you’re immersed in what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what the clock says.”
Consensus is that, in Seattle, Besalu bakes the croissant to beat. The place has been a fixture in Ballard for 12 years, as much a fast-paced production facility as a destination for a leisurely latte or lunch. Miller says that some of his customers have stopped at the shop every single day since it opened. He’s happy to have children come in and see bread made by hand that doesn’t come from a supermarket.
At 1:30 on a recent mid-week afternoon, a few 20-somethings huddle at a table within Besalu’s saffron-colored walls playing Boggle. At another table, a woman props her sock feet on a chair while painting a watercolor. Behind the counter, a young server takes coffee orders before pastry requests. A handful of baking assistants scurry around ovens and mixers. Miller is taking a break from measuring dough on a worn steel balance to chat with a guy in a North Face fleece. The place is brisk and relaxed simultaneously.
“Just like any artist would have an idea in their mind of what they want, I have an idea in mind of what I want to eat when I eat a croissant,” Miller tells me later. “It’s hard to explain. When I watch children here that are five years old eating a croissant, getting in there, tearing it apart, almost with these rituals, eating the inside first or the outside first, really enjoying it, I want to tell the adults, ‘That’s how you should do it.’”
Miller relates one customer’s experience: “He ate the croissant and said, ‘Now I know what Godzilla feels like when he eats a building. I could feel each floor collapsing in my mouth.’ That’s pretty good.”
Eating a Besalu croissant is an experience of sensual science. Its striated curvature appears surprisingly structured, architectural—a tiny, squishy Sydney Opera House. Its consistency occupies an ambiguous interim state of matter between solid and gas. Its flakes are long and fluttery like some kind of silicate mineral. Salt and sweet cream butter lean on either side of the tongue; the tongue is not quite sure how to behave in this ethereal, flavorful encounter. It emits a nostalgic smell of butter and bread. Also qualities more ineffable, like comfort and sophistication and expertise.
Photo by Nate Watters
