Floriole Won't Serve Croissants Until They Are Perfect

By Anthony Todd in Food on Oct 29, 2012 3:40PM

It's no secret that we (and every other lover of sweets in Chicago) are kind of obsessed with Floriole. We've been stuffing our faces with their shortbread before they even opened a cafe, and since the storefront opened, we keep finding excuses to be in Lincoln Park. Now, a blog post reveals why they don't have any croissants at the moment—and just makes us love them more.

Regular customers may have noticed Floriole is currently croissant-free. They've been having some problems with the recipe (their current theory: wet flour) and, since croissants are a signature product, they won't sell them unless they are perfect. Their response to the crisis? They're gonna wait until they get it right.

We had a bumpy week in croissant production and the bakery went croissantless for a few days. Troubleshooting and testing has answered some but not all of our questions. So far it looks like our flour is not as dry as it was last week. In response we have adjusted the amount of liquid we add to our dough and have gotten better results but they are not perfect. We will continue testing; changing ratios of the flours we use, tweaking the hydration, checking temperatures until we figure it out. Just know that our goal is to sell croissants that we (all the Floriole bakers) are proud of and if they are not up to snuff, you won’t find them in our case.

Read the whole post here.

Some restaurant owners have a very short-term vision of their world: "Make money today, gotta stay in business, everything else be damned." This is understandable; margins in the business are small, profits can be low and you have to keep the lights on and the doors open. Even the ones concerned with quality often aren't ready to come out and say "we messed up." When a business tells its customers, "We're so concerned with quality that we'd rather lose revenue than serve a mediocre product," they deserve applause. Head into Floriole, order a sandwich instead, and tell them that you hope that the great croissant shortage of 2012 is fixed soon.