Sometimes, the best ideas are the most obvious. So it goes with the everything bagel croissant (EBC) at Camberwell’s perma-hyped Toad bakery. A pitch-perfect melding of the otherwise unimprovable elements of its name, it is – and this is not hyperbole – an apex example of structural expression up there with St Paul’s and the Mole Antonelliana of Turin.
Behold: a burnished vortex of buttery pastry – resembling a kind of inverted Fibonacci golden spiral that seems to get wider as it curls in on itself – scattered with the titular “everything”: sesame seeds, onion granules and poppy seeds. At its centre is a piped well of chive cream cheese. Maximalist in flavour it may be, but there’s nuance here, too. It’s there particularly in the grassy top note from a drizzle of olive oil, and the grown-up fragrance of scattered, verdant dill fronds (to my mind a subtle dig at the childish palettes normally catered to by Insta-baiting bakeries and their tendencies towards oversized sweet stuff).
It was conceived, as the best things often are, in a state of existential tumult. “The everything bagel croissant was thought up in those five minutes of severe anxiety before drifting off to sleep,” says Toad co-founder and EBC inventor Oliver Costello. “I have so many incoherent ideas in my Notes app under the title ‘Croissant Ideas’. I needed a savoury croissant that was what we call ‘very clean’ in production, meaning that it had no fillings or toppings in all the steps right up until the point it gets baked. The flavour was inspired by, you guessed it … and if it wasn’t criminal to put smoked salmon on a croissant, I would have.”
The amalgam is genius: neither croissant nor bagel, nor the börek it more readily resembles. What it is is a honed example of Costello and fellow co-founder Rebecca Spaven’s intuitive and wildly satisfying baking, a melange of no-brainer titbits made singular in execution.
Being a Toad regular means being enmeshed in tactical logistics. The quiet hours are, of course, sacrosanct; zip along on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday morning between 8am and 1pm and you’ll be queuing anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or more, but it’s emphatically worth the idling. Indeed, the EBC’s reputation more than precedes itself: “I’ve wanted to change it for a while,” Costello concedes, “but I worry people would revolt.”
What’s more, at £5.50 the EBC is daylight robbery for a pastry of such prestige. As my illustrious writer pal Lauren puts it: “It is completely impossible to consume one of these things without audibly grunting with pleasure, like a wildebeest in a mud bath.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. Get in line.
I Can’t Stop Thinking About is a series about London dishes Broadsheet editors and contributors are obsessed with.
