It’s a tense Monday in mid-March, fears of contagion bubbling, but the Nathaniel Reid Bakery remains an oasis. Possibilities shimmer behind glass: Brioche coffeecake filled with cheesecake and a compote of strawberries, tarted with rhubarb and topped with crunchy streusel? The famous chocolate almond croissant, crispy on the outside but molten within, chunks of dark chocolate, slivers of almond, and almond paste between the flaky layers? The raspberry financier; that airy butterfly of a palmier; the simple but decadent kouign-amann, its flaky layers interleaved with sugar and butter? A poppy macaron—which tastes, I’m told, like a floral cotton candy. Opiate enough.
When Nathaniel Reid walks in, I collect myself and give him a cool, professional nod. So what if he was named Pastry Chef of the Year and made the James Beard Award semifinals and this little bakery in Kirkwood was voted one of the nation’s 10 best? Who needs pastry anyway?
Tall, red-cheeked, and a little damp on this rainy spring day, Reid greets his frontline staff one by one. He used to shake everybody’s hand, the way he’s done in every kitchen he’s ever worked, but we are facing a pandemic.
He ducks back out into the cold drizzle; he bought a pineapple to decorate the Polynesian cake. Then he chats just a bit longer, asking how a DJ gig went, how a guy’s father is doing. “In France, they would all stop and have an espresso and talk for 15 minutes,” he says, half admiring, half appalled. “I’m pretty nonstop.”
In the privacy of an office not much bigger than an airplane loo, Reid admits that he didn’t sleep much last night. He was up making three detailed contingency plans, because later today, officials will announce whether restaurants stay open, switch to curb service, or close altogether. “I’ve got all this food that could spoil,” he says, “and there’s a lot of indecisiveness from leaders, not a lot of clarity.”
While he Googles his own bakery (feedback matters), I look at his office walls, festooned with checklists, annual goals, daily reports, and a note from a 9-year-old: “I am not a big fan of bananas but that macaron wus osum.”
Reid rises, visibly shakes off the worry of a forced closure, and strides through the kitchen, sliding a pan of foaming cream off the burner as he passes, pointing to a refrigerator room (“Butter, butter, butter!”) and a warm bread oven, its fragrance a promise of comfort.
“Stirred your caramel,” he calls to someone over his shoulder, his sleight of hand with the spoon so fast, I hadn’t even registered it.
He stops to remind a worker to taste the almonds every time, on guard against the slightest rancidity. Pecans, he buys from a dentist in St. Charles: “He bought a farm. Best pecans I’ve ever had in my life.” Most chefs demand a certain size, but Reid wants taste, and “these are squatty and plump and buttery.”
(In any other story, I would worry about the number of times the word “butter” repeats.)
Kevin A. Roberts
“Want to watch the bread go in the oven?” he asks, eager as a kid. Using his knife like a Japanese calligrapher, he slashes a quick straight line down the center of each ball of dough. “It releases the pressure, the tension, as the steam and gas expand,” he explains. “Either they’re going to break where they want to break, or you’re going to control it. This way, you get something beautiful.”
He sets aside a finished loaf for me. “Which of your jams goes with sourdough?” I ask, craving the one labeled “Champagne.”
“Butter. And toast it at 400 degrees.”
At the counter, a woman is ordering a tall bacon quiche, soft and creamy-eggy. A dad with a toddler in his arms picks a pastry for each of them. A rough-edged bearded guy who’d look at home on a Harley leaves with a beatific smile, carrying both his breakfast and his lunch.
Today is Monday, so there’s a line meeting at 11 a.m. At 10:59, Reid sets down his notes at the big table. Ninety seconds later, he says, in a low voice that is not quite really a reproof but definitely a reminder, “Line up, guys; it’s 11 o’clock.” At 11:02, not everyone has come over, and his tone is sharper: “OK, you guys, bring it in. Every week it’s the same time, right? OK, be on time.”
They scramble.
“We’ve got a lot to go over right now,” he begins. “First the week plan, and then we’ll talk about contingencies.” The Easter menu includes a caramelized smoked ham quiche with tarragon, leek, and potato, he says, and several new cakes, and a panna cotta, “nice and jiggly and soft, not the kind you can dump out and it stands up on its own.”
Stern reminders follow, focused on the various checklists and procedures he uses to impose order. “This industry’s like this,” he told me earlier, bouncing his finger up and down. “I want to soften those peaks and valleys. Most chefs are adrenaline junkies. I don’t want chaos.”
Next, a happy announcement: “We had 18 five-star reviews in a row, and the one that broke the streak was a four-star.”
Finally, the segue into coronavirus: He says he will find out what is possible later today, then reassures them about measures for their own safety and job security. “We’re pros here. We’re gonna do the best we can.”
He will end up closing for good, and he will use those weeks to long-term plan the next decade. The time left over, he will spend with his family, out of doors whenever possible, and this will feel so transformative that he will decide to close two days per week, profit be damned, so he and his employees have a bit more ease.
Kevin A. Roberts
Nathaniel ran across dew-soaked grass to the woods that surrounded his house. His big sister and his dad were still asleep. His mom had moved away, and he didn’t understand why. “You’re only 5,” his sister Ursulla, who was 9, reminded him every time she tried to explain divorce. In the cool shade of an Ozark hardwood forest, though, he could forget about everything but the little lives around him: the wriggling salamanders; the slow, patient turtles; the little tree frogs that also came to Ellington’s town swimming pool; the red, black, and cream milk snake that slithered out, docile and uncertain, when he slowly rolled a log back. When the sun turned white-hot, he would go home for lunch. Even indoors, he felt intertwined with nature.
At first he’d wanted to study stars when he grew up. Then he’d started his rock collection. Ellington, Missouri, was famous for the gorgeous rocks that miners pulled from its earth, and mineralogy sounded cool. Then he discovered snakes. That settled it. He would be a herpetologist.
He intended to work the way his favorite great-uncle did. The joke in town was, Dall McNaill couldn’t walk down the street without getting a job offer. When he mowed his lawn, he went ahead and mowed every other lawn in sight. Organized with military precision, his house was so clean that you really could eat off the floor. Life was not complicated for Uncle Dall; he did not want it to be.
Already Nathaniel was “always busy,” sighed Ursulla, who often found herself helping him search the house yet again for an escaped pet snake. Once she came home and found her little brother cracking walnuts on the white counter, staining it. When they received a Nintendo for Christmas, he sat in front of the screen rapt, tongue in his cheek, until he’d beaten every level. He crashed the three-wheeler regularly; once he ran over his own toe while he was driving, which, Ursulla pointed out, “takes some maneuvering.” Like their father—and Uncle Dall, and their great-grandfather—Nathaniel had “a motor that wouldn’t turn off.”
In high school, he captained the track team, played basketball until he dropped, aced AP classes, got along with everybody. At the University of Missouri– Columbia, he had to study for the first time, so he did. He also pledged Sig Ep—Sigma Phi Epsilon, its motto “Building balanced men.”
The first day of freshman year, he made a solid friend: Doug Niedzwiecki, a city boy from St. Louis. Niedzwiecki found Nathaniel Reid refreshingly real, un-slick, grounded: The dude had a collection of cassette tapes, not even CDs. For fun, he went mushroom picking. He had a rock collection.
The following summer, Niedzwiecki saw how crushed Reid was after he did an internship at Trail of Tears State Park. Turned out, being a herpetologist was more clerical work than Crocodile Dundee. But what else could he do? He’d always walked the straightest, shortest line toward any goal, no detours, no delays. He went home to talk it out, his tone dejected, his tall frame so slumped, it looked like he’d lost his own skeleton.
“Why don’t you become a chef?” his mother suggested, and his head shot up. He’d always loved to cook. After practice, he’d come home late and make his own dinner, and it was always better than whatever his dad had grilled. The plan clicked into place. He thought to study at the Culinary Institute of America, but that didn’t strike his parents as sufficiently practical, so he stayed at Mizzou and majored in hotel and restaurant management. He graduated with honors—and was accepted by Le Cordon Bleu.
Tuition for Paris’s famous cooking school had to be paid up front, so his dad took a second mortgage on their house. Still, sending your son off with a little less than $1,000 to live for a year and a half in Paris? At the airport, he tried to speak and teared up, just hugged his son hard. It was the first time Reid had ever seen his capable, steadfast father cry.
Kevin A. Roberts
Reid wasn’t the least bit worried. He was young, he had almost $1,000 in his bank account, and he was on his way to Paris. On the plane, he started learning French. When he landed, he started apartment hunting—and reality shook him by the shoulders. Even a rat-scampered fifth-floor apartment rented for $1,000—a month.
When he blurted his predicament at Le Cordon Bleu, another student told him about a family that was looking for a live-in chef (and had already run through several). When Reid showed up, fresh-faced and obviously American, they waved him away. They could tell right away what country he was from. Freedom fries?
“Just let me try,” he begged. “If you don’t like my cooking, I get it.”
He cooked dinner for them, a sure calm coming over him as he moved around the kitchen. He was pleased with what he had made, but they seemed unimpressed, in a way he would later understand as “very French.”
A week later, they offered him the job.
No pay, just a room in their earthen-walled basement, and he was to cook a three-course dinner every night and cook for their dinner parties. He was not invited to partake of what he prepared; he would have to exist on leftovers from school. Luckily, he was studying both savory cooking and pastry, determined not to waste his time in Paris, so he would not starve.
Every day, Reid grew more deft, his techniques smoother, his judgment more acute. But he had never felt so alone in his life. On weekends, he would walk the city, get lost and maybe rained on, then find a Metro stop and go home. For him, Paris’ sights were its patisseries. He would make his way to rue Bonaparte and stand inside Pierre Hermé, staring at displays that glowed like jewelry cases. Did Monsieur wish to buy something? Non, non.
His classmates had cash for croissants and more; they were always out having fun. His only taste of luxury was the night an older student, a retired accountant from Boston, invited him and another student to a 16-course dinner at L’Arpège: langoustines, caviar, lobster, and Poulet de Bresse, the world’s priciest chicken, blue-footed yet.
And dessert?
“A caramel mille-feuille and tomate confite aux douze saveurs—he stuffed a tomato with raisins and pineapple bits and basted it with melted butter and a caramel gastrique, then put it on the plate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.” I shudder. He smiles. “It was more of a chef’s dessert than a pastry chef’s.”
Reid earned his grand diploma in both culinary and pastry arts, then went home and poured concrete and shingled roofs with his dad. The best pastry chef in the U.S. had called him at the French family’s house, urging him to get in touch when he was back in the States—then put him off for the summer, then went to Thailand. Finally Reid couldn’t wait any longer. He took a job at The Ritz-Carlton in Las Vegas.
He moved into one of the worst neighborhoods in Vegas—crack dealers used the phone booth outside his apartment building for tense, hurried transactions. In the middle of the night, he’d wake up sweaty because the thin air mattress he was using for a bed had curled around him. But, he was working with Patrice Caillot, formerly of Le Cirque, who’d just won the world pastry championship.
The Ritz did amazing sugar sculptures. And sugar was cheap. Reid haunted Chef Rubber, which sold pastry equipment, until he had enough money to buy himself a sugar booth—basically, a hot light over an acrylic-sided box that would let him practice until he achieved just the right clarity, that magical transparent shine...
The owner refused to sell it to him.
“Dude, you can’t afford this box,” Paul Edwards said. “I was a pastry chef, too, and I started out just the way you are.” Seeing the dismay in the kid’s eyes, Edwards relented: “Tell you what. Before I sell you the box, you need to cook some sugar every day, roll two hot balls, put them in your pocket, hold them while you are walking home, and burn off all the nerve endings in your fingers.”
A week later, Reid was back: “I did it.”
“Great. But you still can’t afford this thing. It’d be $385 with lights, cord, and tray. If I had a floor model, I’d give you a discount, but I don’t.”
Reid waited until Edwards left for a convention, then went back and bought the box.
When Edwards returned, Reid explained his urgency: “I’m kind of thinking I’d like to open my own place.”
A slow head shake. “You’re too young.”
So Reid took a job as chef under Joël Robuchon, who’d been named Chef of the Century by the Gault Millau guide and awarded the Meilleur Ouvrier de France in cuisine. When he’d learned an exhaustive amount, he moved to the AAA Five Diamond St. Regis Hotel, working under pastry chef Stéphane Tréand, also an MOF. Just one year later, Tréand announced that he was leaving and dropped a few jaws by recommending young Reid as his successor.
Reserved by nature, Reid hadn’t been wild about the idea of entering his first competition, the International Pâtisserie Grand Prix. At his boss’ urging, he agreed to serve as the team’s assistant coach instead. They brainstormed a nature-themed entry that included an intricate sugar sculpture of a crane wading in a pond and a fish leaping from the water.
Two or three weeks before the world competition, they learned that one of the three chefs on the team had withdrawn, notifying the competition office in Tokyo but not his own team. Reid would have to take his place.
The first time he completed that sculpture was on the competition floor, bent all day at a 90-degree angle over a low counter (Japan had not anticipated his height). Two other chefs had to basically carry him out the first night. There’d been no water offered—and there was no time to drink it anyway—and pulling sugar is a sweaty business, especially crammed into a small booth onstage with a crowd in stadium seats watching you on a giant screen. (In Japan, a pastry chef has the cachet of John Lennon in the ’60s.) One TV camera came so close when Reid was pulling a giant red sugar flower that he was sure the guy was going to break it.
He won third place for that emergency sugar sculpture, and his chocolate-covered pound cake won first.
By now, Reid had fallen in love with another pastry chef, Lee Lee Lim, who worked alongside him at The Ritz. He wooed her with silky dark chocolate truffles and avoided bringing her back to his air mattress–on–the–floor apartment. Mainly, though, he worked. Lim sensed that he was working toward something, but she wasn’t sure what. As they got to know each other, though, she saw with relief that he could be goofy and lighthearted, too. He just might be worth hanging on to.
Once, they went shopping together. Reid came home with stuff for himself, and Lim came home with presents for her sister and her friend. That was just who she was, Reid realized. She was one of the kindest people he had ever met. And he wanted to marry her.
When his boss persuaded him to enter another competition, this one in New York, Reid decided that he’d go to the diamond district as soon as they announced the results. But when he called home to say he’d won the competition, his parents were bubbling over: His brother had just gotten engaged. Rather than overshadow the big moment—Hey, I won this big competition, plus I’m getting married, too—he sat on his plans for a year and a half.
Edwards was still discouraging him from opening his own shop: “You’re too young and too smart. Go work for Norman Love. He’s the SEAL Team 6 of pastry. There is no margin of error. So go work with him, because either you will be crushed or you will be the best business owner/pastry chef ever.”
Norman Love Confections was clear across the country, in Florida, so Reid asked Lim to drive with him, make it a cross-country road trip. So many chances to propose! The Grand Canyon would be epic—but maybe too contrived? Days passed; nothing felt right. Finally, the night before they would arrive at his parents’ home in Missouri, he burst out with his proposal—in the motel room as Lim was brushing her teeth.
“The ring was burning a hole in my pocket,” he would explain later, “and when it happened, I just felt blinded. It was like being in a zone, like my body was pulling me to do this. I just went down on one knee without even thinking.”
Through the foam, she said a joyful yes.
Over the next two years, Reid helped Love expand to three more locations. Then he called Edwards again: “I’m thinking about opening my own bakery.”
Edwards grinned. “I think you should.”
In 2013, Reid came home to Missouri. He worked as executive pastry chef at The Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis, joined The Ritz’s corporate advisory team, then moved into consulting and teaching. By 2016, he and his dad had turned a building in Kirkwood into Nathaniel Reid Bakery.
It was warm, immaculate, inviting. The signature color he chose was a red-orange that glowed like a setting sun. The fittings were basic: “I’m not selling showcases,” he told friends who’d bought sleeker, more modern displays. “I’m selling pastry, pure and simple. I think people enjoy that, because the world’s kind of overwhelming.”
Six stools lined the window. Those who called asking about reservations or corkage fees were told to take the food home and enjoy it with their family, or share it with coworkers, or eat it in the park. This kind of pleasure should not be available only when you go out to eat, Reid insisted. It should be part of your daily life.
Reid heads back to the kitchen to teach three employees how to decorate the large Genevieve cake, an almond dacquoise topped with a glossy dome of lime and basil, “fresh and bright and acidic,” that’s ringed with raspberries and studded with strawberry wedges and tiny sprigs of anise-scented Thai basil. “We pipe the cake on top of a crunchy almond base,” he says. “I don’t know that anyone’s ever done it that way; I just tried it, and it works.” You can see the spiral formed as the dough circles inward. My eyes, though, are fixed on that lime-green dome, its surface lacquered to a smooth, brilliant shine with his special glaze. Mesmerized, I watch him pour more glaze over the cake round, then level it with a single clean drag of the knife. “One swipe and it’s done,” he instructs. “Don’t keep going back and forth, or you’ll pull it back; it sets super fast. It looks beautiful, doesn’t it?”
He makes the “nice tight ring of berries,” picks through the $30 tray of basil for unblemished sprigs, slices strawberries, changes their position at least 10 times. “There,” he says at last, though I can tell he’s not yet satisfied. Making a cone of the parchment paper, he squeezes the leftover glaze back into the bowl, then slides the not-quite-red-enough bits of strawberry off the worktable. “We keep all the trimmings; we use everything.” He turns back to his students. “Did you guys see some of the new Easter cakes? My favorite was the chocolate sponge with cassis inside and vanilla mousse on the outside, just fresh creamy vanilla like you’re eating ice cream. So pure.”
Other chefs ask, “How do you do it?” when they hear what he does from scratch.
“We make all our pre-ferments,” he explains. “Most places buy their praliné, but we make that, too: It’s a smoky caramel and roasted hazelnuts, puréed into a nut butter that goes into a lot of different products. We make our own pistachio purée, too, and our espresso paste—with Kaldi beans—and our pickled vegetables and slaw and salad dressings and salts and béchamel and almond paste. And our fillings aren’t a bucket of goop loaded with stabilizers and preservatives.” He winces at the thought. “Most luxury brands are just buying ready-made product, and then they bake or glaze it. You are a purchasing department instead of a chef. I don’t want to have a box cutter in my hand instead of a chef’s knife.”
But making everything fresh every time, with no thickeners or stabilizers or additives? It quadruples your work, and all these raw ingredients can be costly in the middle of the country. He shrugs. “My heart has led me this far. If I trusted what was in my wallet, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.”
At home in the evening, Reid does not talk about his day. Until he had to obsess over coronavirus updates, he didn’t even watch TV news or weather; why get caught up in something you can only fret about from afar? At work, he controls everything he can; at home, he wants to be only a dad and a husband.
Lee Lee knows him so well, though, that she can divine the occasional tensions. “When people don’t try, or don’t follow through, I don’t think he can quite understand that,” she tells me. On the other hand, employees aren’t always prepared for someone so exacting and straightforward: “He’s not, like, in your face,” she says, “but he can be…direct. Especially in the kitchen.”
At their craziest, busiest times, his mind goes still, and Reid can see the big picture, know exactly what everyone needs to do to get there. His management ability is formidable. Does he ever worry that he’s throwing so much energy and intelligence into something as ephemeral as puff pastry?
“An argument could be made that it’s frivolous,” he says with a quick nod. “It’s not a necessity, by any means. If the world goes down, it’s not going to be there. But it’s a small pleasure in the day. Our small cakes—where can you find something that might be one of the best things in St. Louis that’s $6?”
What makes him happiest is taking “something very simple looking, a hazelnut pound cake with hazelnut praline, lemon zest, and orange zest inside, and dipping it in milk chocolate that has caramelized hazelnuts. Taking an everyday object and then making it luxurious.” I’m reminded of the French economist who suggested we spend our money on small pleasures so there could be a fresh sense of wonder and joy every day rather than forking over thousands for glitzy appliances whose novelty wears off fast. One bite of a kouign-amann, and life is good again, capable of bringing pleasure, and you are good again, worthy of receiving it.
When I ask Lee Lee about her husband’s secret comfort foods, she answers instantly, with the cutest giggle: “He likes Reese’s peanut butter cups, and he always has to have his Louisiana Hot Sauce. And cheese sauce that’s in a jar.”
Gleeful, I confront him about that plasticky cheese sauce. He grins, answers, “It’s not like it’s good.” But when I mention freezing Reese’s, he rears back: “Oh, I don’t like them frozen. The aromatics are gone, the sensations.” He catches himself. “Yeah, we’re talking about a peanut butter cup, but still. I can’t even stand ice cream with pieces in it. It just does such a disservice to the chocolate.”
Our best social memories include food, he points out, and our best food memories are tied up with love. Lee Lee’s favorite childhood food memory is sitting with her parents on a hillside above Redondo Beach. They’d stop at a crab shack first, then spread out shrimp and crab on newspaper and crack the shells with little wooden mallets, and they’d eat buttered sweet corn on the drive home. His favorite is hanging out with his great-grandfather Delmont Stayton. “He would give me a Barq’s root beer and take out his pocket knife and slice a piece of braunschweiger for me to eat. I liked it because he liked it, and I loved him.”
Food holds people together; it helps memories stick. Reid takes a customer’s special occasion as a sacred responsibility to make something as delicious and beautiful as possible, not as a showpiece but rather as a grace note.
“You see a lot of food that looks great but doesn’t taste very good, and vice versa,” he remarks. “It’s very hard for people to think both ways.”
When I ask how he’s developed such a discriminating sense of taste and flavor, he points to his ever so slightly oversized schnoz. “This isn’t just for show. It works! I can smell things from a mile away, and that’s part of tasting.”
The Reids’ daughter, Amelia, is almost 4 years old, and “she and Nathaniel go outside and explore and pick up sticks or rocks or whatever,” Lee Lee says, clearly not getting it. For years she has watched her husband “go crazy” at “creeks, rivers, anyplace he can turn over a log and see what’s underneath.”
Sure enough, when Reid tells me about Amelia, the first thing he says is, “We like to turn over logs together. She’s my little adventurer. We’ve caught snakes together; she holds them. At the herpetarium at the zoo, it used to be me going through saying, ‘Amelia, look at this.’ Now it’s me trying to keep up as she runs through and says, ‘Daddy, look at this!’”
It’s good to hear about those carefree moments, because his schedule has me tense. At one point, I remark offhandedly about how many people just wing it, and he looks rueful: “And sometimes I wonder if they’ve got it figured out, if I was just lied to all my life! But I just can’t do something halfway.”
Even on vacation, he likes getting lost and not knowing the language, because it forces him to think. It’s too easy, he says, for people to go through an entire year without ever having to really think.
Also, notes Lee Lee, “he really does not like to fail. That’s pretty hard for him.”
His competitive nature is a puzzle, though: He couldn’t care less about beating somebody else or showboating or even knowing who the other participants will be (he never opens the list of names). Yet he will not stop until he has mastered whatever he is attempting.
That’s part temperament, says his sister (married name Ursulla Wadley) and part what they learned from their parents’ divorce: “It dragged on throughout our entire childhood, into our teen years. It wasn’t just a moment. I think both our parents loved us and wanted what was best for us so much that they kind of lost perspective.” Now both parents have been happily remarried for at least a quarter-century, their kids have an extra set of grandparents, everybody gets along, “and it brings more life and more understanding and more experiences,” she adds, “but it did change our lives. You can either sulk or be determined. Just having to decide to move on, I think that’s been a big part of his life.”
Reid doesn’t disagree. “You have things happen; it’s just about how you react to it,” he says. “Fighting through things to make a life.”
Reid cheerfully destroys his health, missing meals and sleep whenever necessary, but he will take any chance to restore his mental equilibrium with a walk in the woods. “The best is the moment you stop and you are still,” he says. “You can keep walking all day, but the moment you stop and listen is the most fascinating moment. There’s so much going on that you never hear because of the crunch of leaves under your feet.”
How does his love of the natural world influence his baking?
“Inspiration,” he says. “There is nothing more beautiful than nature. The best I can do is try to emulate it. I try to make things with colors that feel natural, not too designed or plasticky.” One of his often-copied decorations is a tracery of gold rings he designed at the last minute, en route to a competition in L.A., after seeing Midwestern crop circles from the airplane window. He insists on ingredients that are real, natural, not chemical concoctions.
Lee Lee says he looks for people who are real, too, natural and unpretentious.
In France, he vowed to bring a little more science to the art. “Whenever anything went wrong, the chef blamed the humidity. That was their excuse for everything! It’s probably because they got yelled at so much as apprentices. But all the things they are talking about are not because of humidity, and some of what they insist on is absurd, like stirring in a certain direction.”
At his own bakery, he works with scientific precision, scaling recipes on a microscale, to a hundredth of a gram. His croissant dough is on its 25th iteration, tweaked relentlessly, a little whole wheat flour added for texture, some brown sugar. When he decided to sell bread—miche, a French sourdough batard proofed in a wicker banneton—he made it every day for six months before it ever hit the shelf.
“The same curiosity for life drives him,” his sister remarks, “whether he’s in a stream bed looking for fossils or frog eggs or in the kitchen creating some masterpiece.”
Basically, what he likes is discovering things. “You open up this little cave and find rocks that are a million years old,” he says, “and no one in this world has ever seen them before.” Or you find a cluster of morels or a rat snake, or you invent a new pastry technique or add violet to a raspberry-cassis jam. All of it’s cool.
As Reid is gently requesting that an employee straighten a display sign and asking another to space out the jam jars more evenly and a third to polish a smear from the big window, I test my French on a framed magazine spread, Artisans hors de nos frontières, meaning an editor in Paris thought Reid a foreigner worthy of note. The story summarizes his style as “le raffinement et l’élégance” (refinement and elegance) and begins with the bakery’s exotic location: “Kirkwood. Route 66. Natif de la région…”
“You on spring break?” Reid is asking a teenager in line. He knows names, lives. Would he ever leave, maybe open a patisserie in some fashionable Paris arrondissement where they apparently already love him?
“No, no,” he says wearily. “I’ve had so many once-in-a-lifetime offers that I’ve said no to, because it wasn’t this. This has always been my dream.” Nor does he want to expand, “have a bunch of locations and spend my time in the car going to meetings with lawyers and accountants. Or have some silent or not-so-
silent partner tell me to make this cupcake to increase sales.”
This bakery is his, and he likes running it as he chooses: “Why do I have to walk into a kitchen and hear everybody cussing? Do we have to fly by the seat of our pants all the time and be so reactive? I don’t think so.” The managers’ training guide he created is 100 pages long; he worked on it for more than three months. He wants to be replaceable so he can concentrate on creating new products and working one on one with people. “I go all over the world to teach people. I want to make sure I can do that in my own kitchen.”
Success, for him, is not complicated: “Good food, service, prices, atmosphere. It’s pretty simple, in the end. Everybody wants the shortcut, and there is no shortcut.” He looks out at the bakery. “They know what they are going to get here, and I like that. I think there is an honor in that.”
