Chapter 6: The Tasting

He was, as it turned out, neither bold nor stupid. He was something more difficult: earnest. He sat at the counter and ordered a coffee and the cardamom twist, which was her most technically challenging item and also her favorite, and he ate it with the focused attention of a professional and then he looked at her and said, "This is exceptional." "Thank you," she said, because she had manners even when she was suspicious. "I'm not trying to flatter you. I'm trying to understand what you do that I don't." He turned the plate slightly, a gesture she recognized — the gesture of someone looking at a thing from all angles. "The layers are different. The fat distribution. How long do you laminate?" She told him. Not because she owed him anything, but because someone asking a question that good deserved an answer. They talked for forty-five minutes, first about laminated dough and then about bread proofing and then about the specific challenge of maintaining quality at scale, which she used as an opening to say: "So how do you do it? At Golden Crumb. How do you make thirty locations taste like one person made everything?" "You don't," he said. "That's the honest answer. You make systems that protect the most important things and you let the rest vary. What I fight for is the flavor profile and the texture standards. The rest is logistics." A pause. "The problem is that logistics is what people see. And it looks like the thing they're afraid of." "The thing I'm afraid of." "Is it wrong that it's what I was afraid of too?" he said. "Before I took the job. I turned it down twice. I said yes on the third offer because they let me set the conditions." Nat looked at him across the counter. He was looking at her with the direct, slightly too-open expression of someone who had decided to be honest and was slightly uncertain how it would land. "What conditions?" she asked. "That every location would source locally. That the recipes would be adapted per region with input from a local baker. That I would have final veto on any changes to the core products." He turned his coffee cup in his hands. "It's not perfect. I argue with corporate constantly. But it's not what you think it is." Nat was quiet for a moment. "Why are you telling me this?" "Because the feud you started," he said, with a small smile that she found deeply irritating, "was based on a version of my company that I've been trying to change from the inside. And you have a platform. And I think you might actually care about the right things." The small smile was still there. She was still finding it irritating. She was also, she noticed, leaning forward slightly. "Same time tomorrow?" she said. The smile changed. "I'll bring the croissants," he said.