New York is in a golden age of baked goods. A decade ago, it was a cliché for New Yorkers to visit Paris and come back yearning for that city’s corner boulangeries, which casually sold baguettes that were leagues beyond anything you’d find in the boroughs. Today, even if New York hasn’t matched Paris’s density of excellent options, it has seen a flourishing of superlative baking. In the early twenty-tens, Brooklyn bakeries such as She Wolf and Bien Cuit inaugurated a wave of prestige bread, proffering expertly crafted sourdough loaves. During the pandemic, a number of out-of-work professional bakers started selling bread and pastries out of their home kitchens; more than one eventually turned their quarantine hustle into a brick-and-mortar business. Now a town that used to apologize for its croissants boasts hours-long lines for them: both the West Village and Brooklyn Heights locations of L’Appartement 4F, a game-changing French bakery, are consistently mobbed with people seeking pâtisserie, baguettes, and fifty-dollar boxes of breakfast cereal made of tiny, hand-rolled croissants.