Dumbo Food

NYC's Best Baguette in Dumbo?

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  Photo from New York Mag

Steven L. Kaplan, Professor of European History at Cornell University and apparently the world’s preeminent French-bread scholar, named Dumbo’s Almondine’s baguette the best in New York. New York Mag assembled a baker’s dozen of baguettes from the city’s best bakeries and subjected them to Kaplan’s rigorous system of evaluation. The article doesn’t name all 13 bakeries, but there must be some great bakeries out there that weren’t tested.

In any case, this is the Professor’s assessment:

“Mmmm, yeah,” said the professor. The Almondine baguette has a nice look, nice resonance, and a nice song, he said. It has a little bit of fruit, a peachy, buttery quality in its nose, he noted. It achieves a good marriage of crust and crumb, and although it would not be among the best breads in Paris, it would hold its own clearly in a neighborhood bakery – but then there are 1,275 neighborhood bakeries in Paris.”

The description sounds like a bread version of a snobby oenophile, but haven’t seen any wine described as a “bad case of acne…looks like it has eczema, psoriasis, or leprosy”, “lacks sapidity”, or “reduced the male crust to helpless impotence”, as he did with some of the other baguettes.

I personally haven’t bought their baguette, but Almondine’s was rated best-looking, crust, and crumb. “Amy’s smelled the best, but Sullivan St. Bakery had the best mouthfeel. Kaplan is a tough but fair grader, and only the top two baguettes overall (Almondine and Pain d’Avignon) merited his Michelin-style wheat-sheaves designation.” Have you tried it?

Almondine
85 Water St., Brooklyn, NY 11201
718-797-5026

{Monsieur Baguette, New York Magazine}

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