My earliest memories of the iconic New York City bakery smell are of Lichtman’s, a Jewish-Hungarian bakery on Amsterdam and West Eighty-sixth Street that closed in the 1980s. When my family visited my grandparents, who lived half a block away, we would often stop in for cookies (after picking up roast-beef sandwiches at nearby Barney Greengrass, which has its own iconic New York smell of sawdust, fish, salt, and pickle brine). I remember discovering that Lichtman’s crescent-shaped butter cookies fit perfectly into the cutout in the backs of my grandparents’ wooden kitchen chairs.
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I was delighted to discover a modern incarnation of this scent right before rush hour, in Grand Central Terminal, just past the doors to the Times Square shuttle-train platform. The aroma emanated from New York’s bakery mini-chain Hot & Crusty, which has a small outpost there, a few steps from Zaro’s blockbuster corner store. As it turns out, a batch of the bakery's bread comes out of the oven around this time each day.
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Grand Central has its own signature smell, of course, most intense as you approach the tracks: warm, stale, fan-blown air; mechanics’ oil; and hot metal mixed with a musk of floor cleaner and dank mop-swishings. But the Hot & Crusty smell quickly subsumes these waftings of the station’s underbelly with hot poppy and sesame seeds, caramelized sugar, onion, pepper, warm crust, and yeast. Inside the glass case, black-and-white and chocolate-drop cookies gently melt onto sheets of wax paper alongside rows of cake slices in plastic sleeves, gleaming orbs of egg-glazed challah, curls of rugelach, plump hamantashen, sugar-dusted cinnamon pretzels, linzer tarts as brazen as valentines, and golden palmiers with spiraling lobes, not to mention the shelves of loaves—rye, semolina, poppy. Perhaps it’s Hot & Crusty’s (and Lichtman’s) distinctly New York selection of baked goods (with Jewish leanings) that accounts for the “iconic” aroma.
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On a recent Friday at dusk, I noticed passersby turning their heads as they caught the scent of the bakery. Some drifted toward it, lingering on the outskirts, then stepped into its fluorescent halo and emerged with a wax-paper bag. One businessman bit furtively into an enormous chocolate-chip muffin, glanced around, shoved it back into the bag, and dashed away with the bag mittened over his fist, leaving a trail of brown crumbs. I remembered how torn I had felt as a child between eating the cookies straight out of the bag on the sidewalk and bringing them home to delight in their perfect fit.
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