Slightly off-topic, but this article reinforced the impression that there is a serious shortage of decent pastry bakers in the US. The guy was paying $1.25 wholesale for croissants? The consumer price in France is around $1.05-$1.25, and that's a country with very high labour costs.

It's an interesting dilemma - Croissants have a shelf life of a few max, so they can't be imported. I'm guessing immigration rules + cost of expatriation would make it hard to fly in french boulangers-patissiers? Then I guess the money would be in opening "viennoiserie schools" in the US...

Damn there is a shortage of pastry chefs everywhere.

Biggest issue is, as apprentices (in general), they have to be at work at 2am. (Situational I know, but in general their hours are rather inverted).

I had the option to specialise in pastry when I was an apprentice, but the hours looked so bad.

Now I'd give my left trsticle for a decent pastry chef(well before I left hospitality), so I guess that's karma.

Also croissants - you can get rather high quality par baked fairly cheaply, you can import/export them, as long as they are snap frozen(and most people can't tell the difference). - yes there is a difference before anyone tells me off, I'm just pointing out an alternative

I always wondered why pita bread is so stale/bad in middle-eastern restaurants in Germany and Austria, being that baking pita bread is not that difficult (almost every falafel/shawarma place in Israel have decent pita bread and they can't all be genius bakers).

That isn't due to the lack of pastry chefs. At least it shouldn't be if they have access to refrigeration.

Right, and you honestly don't really need to be a pastry chef to make decent pita bread (I'm a layman and i can make them just fine).

Which makes it all the more puzzling! It's not like it requires any exotic ingredients either...