“How did toast become the latest artisanal food craze?” sounds like the worst kind of Buzzfeed/Upworthy clickbaity headline, and this piece has gone viral enough to warrant it.
But, writing about the start of the San Francisco toast craze for Pacific standard Magazine, John Gravois found a much different story than he was expecting.
But Baker assured me that he was not the Chuck Berry of fancy toast. He was its Elvis: he had merely caught the trend on its upswing. The place I was looking for, he and others told me, was a coffee shop in the city’s Outer Sunset neighborhood—a little spot called Trouble.
Gravois meets Trouble's owner, Giulietta Carrelli, lover of cinnamon toast, who has a remarkable story of her own.
Carrelli’s explanations made a delightfully weird, fleeting kind of sense as I heard them. But then she told me something that made Trouble snap into focus. More than a café, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism—a specialized tool—designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.