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The City Bakery is part bakery, cafe, cafeteria, chocolate shop and caterer. City Bakery has been a destination for New York locals and tourists from around the world since 1990. City Bakery also has locations in three cities in Japan: Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka. City Bakery also owns and operates Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery, an eco-minded bakery business with six locations in New York.

Opening City Bakery
City Bakery is located in the Union Square neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. City Bakery opened on December 8th, 1990, when the Union Square area was on the cusp of a renaissance. City Bakery was one of the founding food businesses in the neighborhood at that moment for a new generation of office workers, retail shoppers and residents that arrived in the area.

When it first opened, City Bakery brought a range of innovation to the bakery category: City Bakery sourced most of its raw materials a half block away at the Union Square Greenmarket. With this approach, City Bakery attached itself to the output of small family farms surrounding the New York region. Menus were determined by what Greenmarket farmers brought to town twice each week [at that time Greenmarket was held only on Wednesday and Saturday; it has since expended to four days a week]. For milk, cream and butter, core staples of a bakery, City Bakery discovered Glensfoot Dairy, then a 200-year old farm in Cherry Valley, New York. Glensfoot produced farmstead milk and cream from a herd of Guernsey cows, and it began a brand new delivery route direct to New York City to supply City Bakery. For flour, City Bakery bought only certified organic flour and oats. These grains came from Community Mill & Bean in Ithaca, New York. To this day, every bag of flour City Bakery has ever opened has been certified organic. This approach to raw materials for a small neighborhood bakery was a new paradigm in 1990. Since then, this approach has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of bakeries in New York. Prior to City Bakery, the most common practice for small neighborhood bakeries was fruit from a can, which was the most readily available year-round bakery supply.

Another innovation from City Bakery was to make lunch and savory foods standard in the sweet-tooth realm of bakery. Fully half of the menu was salad, sandwiches, pizzas and soup, and City Bakery became a lunch destination at Union Square even as word of mouth began to grow about the baked goods. In 1990, the word "bakery" did not yet mean that lunch or dinner was on the menu.

City Bakery operated at 22 East 17th Street from 1990 until 2001. In April 2001, it moved one block west across 5th Avenue to 3 West 18th Street, a space five times larger than the original.

Emphasis on Design
The design of City Bakery was unlike decades of bakeries that came before it. City Bakery brought a modern mindset to the bakery category. It featured 22' high ceilings with stark white walls decorated only with cake boxes - a playful homage to the landmark Chrysler Building decorated with hubcaps near it's spire. The floor was polished concrete, and the other fixtures were marble, green glass and brushed stainless steel. The bakery's minimal design was intended to create a simple backdrop to allow customers to focus on the food.

Founder and Baker
City Bakery was created by Maury Rubin. Maury was a television producer and director at ABC Sports working with legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell, where he won two Emmy Awards for producing and directing. In 1986, as Howard Cosell was retiring, Maury applied an interest in food and signed up for a 6-day pastry class near Lyon, France. The class was taught by Denis Ruffel of Patisserie Millet in Paris. After the class, he became an apprentice pâstissier in Paris. When he returned to New York in 1987, Maury set out to visit nearly every bakery in the city, and decided that his training in Paris was a sufficient basis to open his own bakery. Maury worked mostly at home for three years, developing new recipes, practicing technique and conceptualizing a bakery, until he opened City Bakery in 1990.

Signature Foods and Drinks
When City Bakery first opened, word of mouth spread quickly about the pastry, especially the tarts. Lemon Tart in a Chocolate Crust, Milky Way Tart, Chocolate Custard infused with Ethiopian Coffee Beans, Passion Fruit Tart with a Raspberry Polka Dot, Orange Tarts Made out of Apples, Bunch of Nuts in a Tart, World's First Stuffed Raspberry Tart, Fresh Ricotta Tart with Fruit and Edible Flowers. The combination of creativity and strict seasonality from local ingredients helped City Bakery become a destination for bakery lovers. The novel pastry menu also led to a cookbook, Book of Tarts: Form, Function and Flavor at City Bakery [Willam Morrow & Co.]. Book of Tarts was designed by Maury Rubin himself, and the book won the 1996 IACP Cookbook Design of the Year Award.

City Bakery hot chocolate was another noteworthy menu item. It was listed on the menu the day City Bakery opened as "Real Hot Chocolate." This hot chocolate wasn't made with cocoa powder - standard at the time - but from high-quality couverture chocolate, melted to create an intensely rich and novel drink. New Yorkers began lining each winter for City Bakery hot chocolate, which led to the creation of The City Bakery Annual Hot Chocolate Festival, still held every February, when Maury offers a different flavor hot chocolate everyday of the month.

As interest in City Bakery hot chocolate grew, higher-quality hot chocolate began to appear on menus everywhere, from bakeries to coffee shops and even high-end restaurants. The New York Times attributed this to the influence of City Bakery hot chocolate: " ... what is no mystery is the effect Mr. Rubin's hot chocolate had on the city's hot chocolate landscape. He opened the floodgates for the sea of serious hot chocolate contenders that exist in New York today."

The Pretzel Croissant is another signature pastry from City Bakery. It was created in 1996 by combining a traditional French croissant with some of the ingredients of a classic German pretzel. In 2015, the New Yorker Magazine produced a video on how the Pretzel Croissant is made.

Media
The New York Times Magazine called Maury Rubin "a baking impresario." Smithsonian Magazine has called the City Bakery croissant "the best croissant...in New York City." When City Bakery expanded to a new space in 2001, New York Magazine wrote "you'll never have to leave." The Los Angeles Times called Maury Rubin "[a baking] master."

City Bakery Japan
In 2013 City Bakery Osaka, a licensed operation, opened in Grand Front Plaza. City Bakery Osaka opened with long lines for several months, and was forced to establish a limit of two Pretzel Croissants only for each customer. Since then, City Bakery has opened locations in Tokyo, including Shinagawa Train Station and Tokyo Plaza in the Ginza Shopping District.

Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery
In 2005, Maury Rubin designed and built an experimental bakery that had no formal name, but featured the words "Build A Green Bakery" on the front window. The concept for the bakery was to run an environmentally-friendly food business in a big city. This was a tiny storefront [240 square feet] that offered only ten pastries and four drinks. Each pastry cost $2 and the drinks were $1. The bakery was built out of sustainable building materials like Wheat Board - a plywood-like material made from surplus straw and wheat - a cork floor and LED lights. The bakery, at 223 First Avenue, was located on a newly built bike path by New York City, and bike riders were offered a 50% discount if they entered with their bike helmet [the discount was so popular, it had to be reduced to 15%]. Other green initiatives: the bakery used wind-power [and promoted it to customers who were NYC residents], the staff wore shirts, hats and jackets that were either vintage or made from bamboo or hemp, all coffee grounds and wet food waste were sent to a local community garden to be composted. The intention of not naming the bakery in the early days was to entice customers to ask questions about the design materials the bakery was built from and hopefully discuss the environmental mission of the business with staff.

Of the bakery with no name, New York Magazine wrote: "When is a bakery not a bakery? When it’s a political statement, an architectural pioneer, and a bit of performance art, all wrapped in one." After six months, the bakery was formally named Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery, and has since expanded to five locations in Soho, Midtown and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.