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Re:What happened when I opened a restaurant in Portland by namdnay on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @07:45AM (#15440969)
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...

Re:What happened when I opened a restaurant in Portland by marak830 on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @06:25PM (#15445836)
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

Re:What happened when I opened a restaurant in Portland by ido on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @01:41PM (#15443757)
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).
Re:What happened when I opened a restaurant in Portland by marak830 on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @06:26PM (#15445845)
That isn't due to the lack of pastry chefs. At least it shouldn't be if they have access to refrigeration.
Re:What happened when I opened a restaurant in Portland by ido on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @04:01AM (#15448042)
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...