The Humble Gourmand

The famous Clinton St. pancakes

On a recent Sunday, I stood at the kitchen counter mixing the ingredients for my pancakes, as I do most Sundays. Only now, I was measuring out 20 times the usual amount of flour, sugar, and eggs. Instead of pajamas and slippers, I wore a white baker’s tunic and baggy black pants that quickly showed the flour I had managed to pour all over myself.

The clock struck 6 a.m. and the day was underway at Clinton St. Baking Company & Restaurant, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

I’ve always loved to bake, but up to this point I hadn’t managed anything much larger in scale than a double batch of chocolate chip cookies. The bakery at Clinton Street, which goes through 500 pounds of flour a week, had my kitchen dwarfed. The electric mixer, sitting on the kitchen floor, came up to my shoulder. I could have taken a bath in the mixing bowl.

The day began when Holly, the head baker, handed me a uniform and put me to work cutting out biscuits, one of the bakery’s signature items. I had three sheets of dough in front of me, and I was to cut about 50 biscuits out of each with a cookie cutter.

I started out going along in neat little rows, trying to make each biscuit exactly the same shape. Soon I noticed Holly eyeing the clock. I’d been at it for 15 minutes and had yet to finish the first sheet. Hungry customers were waiting. They arrived at the bakery before it opened and stood outside in line for an hour for these biscuits.

I picked up the pace and soon had the biscuits turning a beautiful golden brown in the oven. But I didn’t have time to admire my work. Latoya, Holly’s assistant, put me on pancake duty.

Clinton St. Baking Company is known for its pancakes. For a Sunday brunch, the cooks upstairs will go through six paint bucket-size vats of pancake batter, which are mixed up in the downstairs kitchen. Under Latoya’s supervision, I weighed out the ingredients and started mixing. It didn’t take long before my arm was tired, but after watching Latoya carry out a 50-pound bag of sugar from the back room, I decided I would just have to tough this one out.

After I had made a triple batch of cookie dough and had brownies baking in the oven, Latoya took me upstairs for a look. I had seen the dining area and counter in the dead of morning when I first came in and the sky was still dark. I had also been up there to help Holly line up muffins on the counter and place scones on plates.

I peeked out from behind the swinging kitchen doors that had always held much mystery for me. Now with customers filling the tables, I felt deeply proud of what I’d done. I wanted to tell them, “Hey, the reason your pancakes are so fluffy? That’s because I whipped up the egg whites. And you see how your biscuit is so perfectly shaped? Yup, that’s me too.”

We returned to the chocolate-y, cinnamon-scented downstairs, which I now knew was the heart of the operation. In this tight space where you have to keep yourself pressed against the counter to let people through, the staples of the bakery are produced.

Noontime hit and so did exhaustion. The chefs brought down a plate of pancakes and an egg sandwich for me to try. I had already sampled my fair share for quality control purposes, of course. But Latoya and Holly insisted that I taste some of my work.

The food had me amazed, not just because it was delicious but because of the effort I knew was needed for every little piece of my meal. Upstairs, sitting at a table, it’s so easy to forget what goes into what we eat, and I’m not just talking about ingredients. Latoya and I had made batter down in the kitchen. One of the chefs upstairs had cooked it into pancakes and cut up the strawberries on top. The accompanying maple butter had been made in-house. Holly had made the dough for the biscuit, and I had cut it out and put it in the oven. Then it had headed upstairs where the chefs cooked the accompanying eggs and bacon.

“So you’re going to drop out of school and become a baker?” Holly asked, laughing, as I handed her my uniform.

I smiled, but there was something to her suggestion. I felt elated as I headed home with my shoes splattered in pancake batter to the point where it appeared I had been painting. The time had gone by in a flash. As a writer, I rarely get to create something tangible, something that people can hold in their hands — or, in this case, hold briefly before eating. There was something so very satisfying in that.

Clinton St. Baking Company & Restaurant
4 Clinton St.
New York, NY 10002
(646) 602-6263

Photos by Karsten Moran. You can see more of his work here.

1. Rhonda

   February 4 9:37 p.m. 1

   Good story... I can smell the bread baking.