NEW YORK — The line on a rainy Thursday starts forming well before 11 a.m., when Lucie Franc de Ferriere props open the doors of her cozy, marigold-colored shop in the East Village.
Unlike most bakeries with a selection of bread, croissants and pastries, From Lucie focuses on cakes. And the dozen people in line all want a slice: the bright drama of a wedding cake’s spongy layers, covered in swirls of buttercream and dotted in a confetti of fresh flowers, combined with the nonchalance of a weekday afternoon.
“Sure, this is a cake. It’s not a big concept. But the way that you do cake, the way that you present it, the love that goes into it, I can just tell the artistry. It makes it special,” customer Aida Vianna, 32, said as she sat down in the window seat with her lemon olive oil cake ($11). “I’m just treating myself to a beautiful place.”
The demand points to what some in New York are calling a “cake renaissance.” And Bernadette Haas, who represents 700 bakers as the executive director of the Retail Bakers of America, says she has seen a “whole new energy” in the cake industry nationally.
“We’re so used to the last 20 years of you have to buy the whole pie or buying a huge cake,” Haas said. “But what I love about it the most is I feel like people are getting the sense of slowing down and enjoying the bakery.”
Haas attributes the revival to a confluence of factors: newfound creative expression among bakers, the power of social media marketing and a shift in consumer patterns post-pandemic.
“The consumer is being a little bit more indulgent,” Haas said. “They’re willing to pay for a scratch bakery. They’re willing to pay for something that’s a custom cake.”
Andrew Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, who is from a family of bakers, says the demand comes after years in pandemic-induced isolation.
“We had to miss out celebrating with our loved ones,” Rigie said, “and now what better way to do it than with a beautiful delicious cake?”
When Franc de Ferriere, 27, first told people she was opening a bakery to simply sell cakes, some couldn’t fathom the concept.
“One particular neighbor told me three times, ‘Are you going to make bread? Have you thought about my idea of making bread?’” Franc de Ferriere said. “I was like, ‘Drop it — I’m not making bread.’ It was almost like trying to reassure me and tell me: ‘Are you going to be okay if you only make cakes?’”
She had rented a small kitchen space, so she could work on more preorders than in her apartment kitchen. She was honest with herself: She didn’t want to agonize about the survival of her bakery in a larger space with an exorbitant rent.
Whatever concerns she had about her prospects evaporated on the first day, when she was greeted by around 500 customers. She soon found herself wrapping her mind around a novel concept: that so many people would want individual slices.
The response has flipped her business model. She opens the shop Thursday through Sunday focusing on producing cakes, banana breads, cookies, coffee and tea for hundreds of customers daily. She and her team of bakers make sheet cakes and mini sheet cakes in three flavors, such as rhubarb blackberry cake with blackberry jam and ginger buttercream and chocolate cake with salted dark chocolate. They make five 8-inch cakes in three flavors and around 60 mini cakes every day. Although the shop closes at 7 p.m., she regularly sells out of cakes by 4 p.m. On days when she is closed to the public, she works on preorders for weddings, birthdays and other events.
Other bakers who recently set up shop in the city, such as Clio Goodman of ByClio in Brooklyn and Eunji Lee of Lysée in Manhattan, were also surprised by the response to their cakes.
Amid professional training in Paris and a career spent at Michelin-starred restaurants, Lee, 36, spent a lifetime dreaming up the concept of Lysée, whose name combines her surname with musée, the French word for museum. When she opened in the Flatiron District in June 2022, guests waited in line for up to two hours.
She quickly expanded, upping the cake production from 40 or 50 cakes per day to more than 100 of each, hiring more positions, ordering additional pastry molds and working longer hours to meet demand.
A host greets guests at the front of Lysée, as they would at a restaurant, a position Lee discovered she needed for guiding her 250 to 300 daily customers through the concept.
Guests walk up a set of stairs, then peruse the gallery of mini-cakes and other pastries on plates, essentially a live menu. The traditional Korean mother-of-pearl walls and wood pillars throughout the gallery evoke Lee’s origins. After taking the same pace they would at an art gallery, guests can place an order and take their single-serving cakes to-go. For those dining in, seating is on the bottom floor, where Lee watches in delight from the chef’s window.
“And when I see like they’re taking our photos, ‘Oh so pretty,’ and then when they eat it, ‘Oh, this is so good,’ it makes me [feel] like yeah, it’s okay,” she said. “Like for 15 hours working per day — it’s gone.”
Claudia Yu of New York was visiting Lysée to get a cake for her friend’s birthday. “I love this moment that we’re having with cake,” she said. People are “making any normal day an occasion.”
Word of Lee’s bakery reached international interest through social media, with customers coming from as far away as Malaysia, Korea and Italy for her signature corn cake ($18). The confection, made of corn mousse, crema, cake and cookie, is designed to look like corn on the cob. The whimsical trompe l’oeil presentation involves a meticulous, three-day process that includes hand-piping “kernels,” dusting the cake yellow and using green-tinted white chocolate with roasted corn powder to create the “husks.” Lee now makes well over 100 corn cakes a day, among the other dozens of sweets offered.
“Our customers who come to Lysée, it’s not only for celebrating, but also they say … ‘After work or too much stress, I just have a bite of sweet and then it makes me feel happy and good,’” Lee said.
When Goodman, 35, opened ByClio in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood in January, she didn’t think people would eat entire slices, but she sells just as many cakes as slices as she does whole ones for celebrations and events. Between both, she and her team make more than 200 cakes a month.
Emerging from the coronavirus pandemic, people are giving themselves more permission to fully indulge in the art of cakes, she said, including the amusing and the approachable. She says the industry has shifted too, giving more legitimacy to cake decorators, whose work was once seen as a “cheesy category.”
In Goodman’s bakery, gone are the days of rules in cake decorating.
“I stress out my staff because I eyeball everything,” Goodman said as she began pouring cream into a stand mixer to whip up icing. “That’s where the chaos comes in. I had a chef tell me one time I was like a line cook in the pastry station.”
She spreads the airy icing onto her cakes in swoops, creating peaks and pockets as a natural place for fresh flowers and fruit.
Goodman’s cakes reflect an aesthetic shift that has coincided with the effects of inflation. Haas of the baking association says the cost of decorating ingredients, such as sprinkles, has increased by 300 percent over the last year and a half.
So a trend like the “naked cake,” with exposed sides, not only “looks super breathtaking,” Haas said, “There’s not as much time to put into it to decorate it. There’s not as much ingredients to put into it.”
Economic pressures have also been prompting many Americans to shift to “small affordable indulgences,” industry researcher Anne-Marie Roerink of 210 Analytics said. Among slices of cakes, other sweets like cookies and doughnuts have seen a “big growth in recent months.”
With grocery stores across the nation having closed their bakery departments or no longer making specialty cakes in house, there’s been a return to stand-alone bakeries like Goodman’s.
“The way that American entrepreneurship has always worked is that people find gaps in the market,” Roerink said. Whereas supermarkets move toward standardization, stand-alone bakeries have the liberty to “create small batches and have a lot more fun with flavors and experimentation, and that’s something that Gen Z and millennials love.”
Lauren Fox, 26, one of Goodman’s longtime clients, came in during her lunch break for a slice of “Umber’s cake” ($15), which layers espresso cake, candied kumquats and cream over a chocolate chip cookie base. “Clio’s cakes are basically like art, and just to indulge in that is a nice thing too,” she said.
Though Fox discovered Goodman during her pop-up days on the Lower East Side, most ByClio clients are driven through social media, which Goodman credits with the industry’s aesthetic shift from overly edited perfection to a relatable attainability.
“Instagram can really make people feel like they're not doing enough when they are doing enough,” she said. “But when you see something, you know, a little bit messy or a little bit imperfect, it's like, ‘Okay, well, I'm a little bit imperfect too, and that looks great. So maybe I'm doing great.’”
Franc de Ferriere also credits social media with much of her success. Like Goodman, she does the marketing for her business. During the pandemic and before opening a storefront with a cake display, Instagram was the one way she could show what she was making and start to create community.
As for her concerned East Village neighbor who once pestered her to make bread, Franc de Ferriere, who’s “actually pretty bad at making bread,” says he’s a regular now.
“When I opened, he came back,” she said. “He’s like, ‘Oh, okay, I get it.’”
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