User:Thecitybakery/sandbox

City Bakery is a New York City bakery and cafe in the Union Square neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. City Bakery opened on December 8th, 1990, a time when the Union Square area was on the cusp of a renaissance. City Bakery was one of the founding food businesses in the neighborhood for a new generation of office workers and retail shoppers in the area.

When it opened, City Bakery brought new ideas to the bakery category: besides baked goods, half the menu was savory: salads and sandwiches and soups, which made City Bakery a lunchtime destination, novel for any bakery at that time. City Bakery sourced a majority of its raw materials a half block down the street from the Union Square Greenmarket. In so doing, City Bakery made itself reliant on small farms from the Northeast region. As such, City Bakery's menus, sweet and savory, were highly seasonal and dependent on what Greenmarket farmers brought to town. For milk, cream and butter, City Bakery discovered Glensfoot Dairy, a 200-year old family farm in Upstate New York that produced farmstead milk and cream from a herd of Guernsey cows, and became their first direct New York City customer. For flour, City Bakery bought only certified organic flour and oats 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 a single neighborhood bakery using regional agriculture for all of its staple ingredients was a new paradigm in 1990. Since that time, this approach to ingredients has become standard practice for a generation of bakeries in New York and beyond.

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

Design The design of City Bakery was unlike traditional bakeries. City Bakery was thoroughly modern and featured 22"-high white walls decorated only with cake boxes [use a cake box wall pic] an homage to the landmark Chrysler Building decorated with hubcaps [use a hubcap pic]. City Bakery's floor was polished concrete and other key design materials were stainless steel, marble and green glass. The bakery's minimal design was intended to create an unavoidable 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 the legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell. In 1986, after Howard Cosell retired, Maury applied a growing interest in good food in the form of a 6-day pastry class near Lyon, France; 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 France was a sufficient basis to open a bakery with new ideas and approaches. Maury worked mostly at home practicing technique and developing new recipes from 1987 until 1990, when he had raised enough money to open City Bakery.

Signature Foods and Drinks Word of mouth about City Bakery spread quickly when it opened, and much of it was based on City Bakery 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 popularity of these pastries led to a cookbook: Book of Tarts, Form, Function and Flavor at The City Bakery published by Willam Morrow & Co. in 1995. Book of Tarts was designed by Maury Rubin, and won the 1996 IACP Cookbook Design of the Year Award.

City Bakery hot chocolate was another notable item on the menu. The hot chocolate was not made with cocoa powder, as all hot chocolate was at that time, but instead, Maury Rubin as Hot Chocolate Maker melted the premium couverture chocolate to create an intensely rich drink that New Yorkers began lining up at City Bakery for each winter. This led to the creation of the City Bakery Annual Hot Chocolate Festival [use a HCF few poster images] every February, which continues to the present day, and is a destination event for chocolate lovers around the world.

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

Media Smithsonian Magazine has called the City Bakery croissant "the best croissant in the country." The New York Times Magazine called Maury Rubin "a bakery impresario." When City Bakery expanded to a new space in 2001, New York Magazine wrote "we fear we will never leave." The Los Angeles Times called Maury Rubin "a baking master." [need to double check quotes].

City Bakery Japan In 2002 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 2 Pretzel Croissants only for each customer. Since then, City Bakery has opened locations in Tokyo, including at Shinagawa Train Station and at Tokyo Plaza in the Ginza Shopping District.

Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery In 2015, Maury Rubin designed and built an experimental bakery that opened only with 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 a total of ten pastries and four drinks. Each pastry cost $2 and the drinks were $1. The bakery was built out of sustainable building materials like Wheatboard a plywood-like substrate 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 and bike riders were offered a 50% discount if they entered with their biking helmet [the discount was so popular, it had to be reduced to 15%].

New York Magazine wrote at the time: "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." Birdbath Green Bakery has since expanded to five locations in Soho, Midtown and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.