THE FRENCH PASTRY CRAZE THAT TOOK OVER TIKTOK
A BEMUSED PARIS bakery owner has been besieged by smartphone-wielding youngsters over the past year, keen to snap themselves with the latest pastry craze: the crookie.
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The crookie was invented by Parisian pastry chef Stephane Louvard in 2022.
It was “just something for regulars”, he said, until a video by Instagram account “The Ultimate Guide”, which specialises in Paris restaurants, drove sales up to 150200 per day. Then in early 2023,
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“We had hundreds of people coming, most of them young women between 18- and 25-yearsold, smartphones in hand to take photos with them,” Louvard said in his kitchen as workers rushed to spread cookie dough into croissants.
In the weeks that followed, the queue never seemed to diminish in front of the bakery. Production is now between 1,000 and 1,600 crookies per day and Louvard has had to hire two extra workers.
He is pleased, but somewhat bemused, over the craze.
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“At some point you have to ./*+ǟ /ǭ. %0./ .*( **&$ $) -*$.. )/Ǡ $/ǭ. )*/ .*( - 1*'0tionary invention.”
Thanks to Tiktok, Maison Louvard now has imitators around the world, with crookies spotted in Brussels, New York, Tel Aviv and Singapore.
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In 2013, New Yorkers slept on the pavement outside Dominique
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In 2022, the New York Roll, a mixture of croissant and bombolone (an Italian pastry) turned into a frenzy, with videos featuring the cake accumulating hundreds of millions of views on Tiktok, driving a hunt for more baked crazes.