Old school readers from my livejournal days may recall that I have an ongoing grudge against Magnolia Bakery for crimes against midwesterners (long story involving the phrase "We didn't realize people in Chicago were so attached to menus") and I'm cackling like a supervillain this morning over their health inspection issues.
It's a saying in Chicago that high health inspection scores are a great way to tell who is paying bribes to health inspectors, but I'm still just a little gleeful.
...would you consider retelling the menu story for those of us who weren't around in the livejournal days? 🥺👉👈
It's not super exciting in retrospect, it was just funny at the time :) Magnolia Bakery had just opened in Chicago after being THE bakery that made Cupcakes Happen in NYC, and I had a friend visiting who wanted to try them out. So we consulted the website, which listed their flavor offerings including the daily special flavors, and I went down to the storefront with a list to buy them.
I started to give my order to the woman behind the counter and she immediately started shouting at me that we didn't have this that or the other, really aggressively given I was just placing an order. I hadn't been rude or asked for special treatment or something. I said "Sorry, that's what was listed on your website, what DO you have?" and she shouted some more and gestured at the display case.
So I picked out what I thought would be good from what was available and paid and went home, and that evening I made a -- I have to stress this -- entirely amused post about how if you're not going to carry a certain flavor on a certain day maybe don't list it as a flavor of the day. I get sometimes there are issues with ingredients, but by then there were multiple other cupcake shops in Chicago that did not seem to have this issue. We all laughed, we had cupcakes, life was fine.
A few days later, somehow the bakery manager found my post -- this was pre-algorithm, I had maybe 3000 readers at most, on a blogging site that was not all that well known. And she left a frankly rather nasty comment about how Magnolia Bakery originated in New York, and New Yorkers understood these things, and they hadn't realized when they expanded that Midwesterners were so attached to their menus.
Yeah. How dare we bumpkins out here in corn country see a menu and presume the establishment showing us the menu actually offers what is on it?
Anyway, I replied that I wasn't aware New York, a culinary capital of the world, was unfamiliar with the idea of a list of food and prices for said food. I suggested perhaps they could speak to their peer institutions in Chicago, like Sugar Bliss or Sprinkles, and see if they could help Magnolia Bakery out if they were struggling with the concept.
I did not receive a reply, but I laughed about that for days. We're too attached to our menus.
Anyway thenceforward they were added to the list of places in Chicago against which I hold a grudge, which also included Corner Bakery. If I had a nickel for every bakery I had a grudge against I'd have two nickels, which isn't that many, but it is weird it's happened twice.
