. Over the past year, as restaurants hired back for takeout and outdoor dining, the pastry chef wasn’t necessarily included. With their old restaurant jobs gone, and the future of them uncertain, chefs who founded cottage bakeries are rethinking everything. Like Ziskin, Laura Hoang found herself at a crossroads with the restaurant industry right before the pandemic started.
The shattering of the traditional pastry chef role has created surprising new connections, too. During normal times, most chefs and cooks rarely connect with people outside of the kitchens they work in; this is true even of chefs at the head of restaurants, who often meet each other for the first time at food festivals. But because they are posting so much of their own work on Instagram, all of these bakers have come to know and admire each other.
But working at the absolute capacity of their home kitchens, for a year straight, means burnout is very real. Multiple chefs I spoke to said their houses were full of pastry boxes and their fridges full of butter and freezers full of ice cream; they cooled cakes in stages on tiny counters and used stimulus money to buy equipment; their plants are long dead and their kitchens reek of fryer oil; their phone won’t stop binging, and when their oven died, they switched to steamed and boiled desserts.
As the vaccine rollout begins to allow the restaurant industry in Los Angeles to open back up again, many of these chefs are thinking about the next phase of their business. “I wonder if anyone else expressed this concern that pandemic businesses are just that and folks will forget us when they can go to, like, Bestia again,” Ziskin says.
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