The Brownstones Demand a Bakery
Welcome to Buffet Magazine, an independently owned digital food magazine. Our Tuesday editions are where we feature great writing about food. Thursday is for recipes.
IN THIS ISSUE: A Basque lobster pit, soggy grapes, and too many Hatch chiles.
Appetizers
Vacation Crustaxean
At the sun-glazed port of Pasajes, a minutes-long ferry hop through the Bay of Biscay from San Sebastián, you’ll find Casa Cámara, a 140-year-old sanctuary for fancy Basque seafood. Five days a week, the restaurant flings out wave after wave of divine shellfish jetsam, like Galician clams dunked in parsley broth, king prawns swimming in garlic and chili, and brown crabs au gratin. It would be uncouth to leave Casa Cámara, though, without summoning at least one lobster—spiny or Atlantic—from the conspicuous pit in the middle of the dining room. The Casa hangs off the coast over the sea, with a staircase on one side descending directly into the water. Once someone orders a lobster, thick ropes hoist a cage sunk into the ocean up into the restaurant, where the crustacean in question meets its fate. The pit was out of commission when my compatriots and I ate there this week—staff blamed both a broken pulley and polluted water seeping in from the wider bay—but we cracked and cleaned a brace of buttery lobsters kept in a traditional tank regardless, leaving behind nothing but boiled exoskeletons as red as totalled Testarossas. When the check arrived, we took turns guessing what time it was, only to discover we had whiled away three and a half hours at our perch above the waves. —Alex
Raining, Pouring
We can’t all vacation on the Costa Vasca. I spent a drizzly couple of days in the Finger Lakes this past weekend, where the nor’easter clouds fuzzed down the valleys to blur the horizon on all sides. Luckily, there were plenty of wineries to visit, though it was hard to fully escape the nebulous mood. One vintner told me a tale of woe. They’d originally set out, fresh from an inspiring stint working Austrian grapes in the Burgenland, to cultivate old-world cold-weather wines that could sing across the Catskills as well as the Alps. They got an acre of Riesling and tried their best, but the insistent wet of central New York just produced the same result every year: rotten clusters, disintegrating in the damp. Luckily, they discovered hybrid American grapes; we toasted the wet with a floral and zingy co-ferment of Chancellor, Baco Noir, and Traminette, which all grew right as rain. —Sam
Plan Hatched
One of the perks of living across the street from a bar with no freezer (and subsequently becoming good friends with the owner of that bar) is receiving an 11 p.m. text asking if you have enough freezer space to store a lunchbox full of Hatch chiles flown in that day from Santa Fe. My freezer is now chock-full of chile, intended for some undisclosed future bar use. But I plan on levying a tax (sorry, Patrick, if you’re reading this). My question: what should I do with them? I’ve never cooked with Hatches before, minus the canned stuff. Send in your ideas, and I’ll report back. —Cale
The Brownstones Demand a Bakery
How a sleepy, rich neighborhood became a croissant mecca
Within the 0.32 square miles of Brooklyn Heights, an urban jewel box of stately nineteenth-century brownstones and the occasional cobblestone street, five bakeries opened in rapid succession from 2022 to 2025.
New York is a dense city, but five is a lot for a ten-by-four grid, and Brooklyn Heights is specifically unlike the rest of the city. The brownstones running up and down Joralemon, Pineapple, Orange, and Cranberry streets are, by and large, single-family affairs. Celebrities like Matt Damon, Adam Driver, and Jenny Slate are known residents of the neighborhood. This is not midtown Manhattan—or even a normal upscale Brooklyn neighborhood. The area’s only strip zone for commercial storefronts, Montague Street, had long seemed strangely resistant to the artisanal and upscale delights that decades ago crowded into Cobble Hill, Park Slope, and Fort Greene.
Some unknown dam broke after the pandemic. The first of these new bakeries was L’Appartement 4F, a Parisian patisserie started by Gautier and Ashley Coiffard out of their Cobble Hill apartment in 2020 that became a Brooklyn Heights brick-and-mortar in 2022. Next came Cloudy Donut Co., a Black-owned vegan donut spot; Poppy’s, a cafe that sells bakery items and prepared foods; Ferrane Bakery, selling Swedish bread and pastries; and most recently Diljān Bakery, selling Afghan baked goods.