The Tastemakers by David Sax Read Free Book Online Page B

treats people will pay more money for. They have paved the way for every artisanal donut shop, grilled cheese pop-up, and slider miniburger that has come along since the mid-1990s. Starbucks didn’t create the cappuccino and latte, and the chain reached its pinnacle in 2008, before the recession forced them to close thousands of stores. Butthe trend Starbucks fostered with coffee-drinking behavior, in the way Magnolia did with the cupcake, fundamentally changed the coffee market around the world, creating demand for high-end coffee products in places where low-budget instant coffee once was king. Now you find small independent “third wave” latte art shops around the corner from your home and push-button espresso machines in every single restaurant. Joel Stein, he of the snide cupcake remarks in
Time
, told me the cupcake has now become the “default American dessert” like pie was a century ago.
    As for the cupcake itself, I believe it will slowly revert to the kid-friendly birthday treat I recall from my youth, which is its logical end. “Cupcakes are cheaper to buy and cheaper to bake,” said my cousin Caroline Davis, whose Toronto bakery, Two Moms, has practically cornered the city’s kosher cupcake market, especially at schools. (Okay, disclosure time: she also made cupcakes for my wedding, and I was delighted to have them.) The cupcake’s advantage remains central to its form: it costs less than regular cake, requires no cutlery to serve or eat, can be customized for groups (a dozen vanilla, a dozen red velvet, two nut-free, two dairy-free, etc.), and they look great. “I like cupcakes,” said Davis, who had recently visited Georgetown Cupcake with her kids on a trip to DC, “but I just don’t understand this craze. I mean, I wouldn’t want to wait in line for one.” The cupcake trend, for all its fireworks and sex appeal, was merely the symptom of the cupcake’s inherent perfection and familiarity, something I knew from the first time I ate one, and this is why it was able to grow so wide and large. But transforming something as familiar and fun as a cupcake into a trend was one thing. What I wanted to find out was how someone could cultivate a food trend from the ground up, starting with an idea, a patch of dirt, and a seed for a food that almost no one had ever tasted.

P arking is not an easy feat in Charleston’s historic downtown, and no one knows that better than Glenn Roberts, who has a story to tell about each spot he passes. One is in front of a building that belonged to his old friend, now dead, and another spot is in front of one of his first houses here, back when this upscale area was a mixture of eccentric bohemians, conservative members of South Carolina’s grand families, and the African American workers whose culture they all drew from. “Oh hell, let’s just park here and hope the guard is asleep in the booth,” Roberts said, pulling into a private lot. “We aren’t going to be more than an hour anyway.” Roberts peeled his long body out of the car and went around to the trunk.
    Though Roberts is in his mid-sixties, his Dennis the Menace–worthy flop of silver hair, faded jeans, and heavy work boots makes him look like a much younger man. He speaks in a booming voice that quickly fills any space he occupies with a mixture of personal tales (“I once drove mangoes cross-country in a big rig through here!”), arcane local history, and a passionate diatribe for what he loves, which is the traditional food of the Deep South and America. Roberts is a first-rate adventurer and wanderer, the type of all-American man they once sent to space, not because he was a physicist but because he’d jump on a missile and ride that bastardjust for the hell of it. He is a Californian with feet in New York and his heart firmly in the South, and in the world of American food he is a legend both for his outsized