Tosi, at the New York apartment that is now more like a pied-à-terre.
Photo: Dolly Faibyshev
Christina Tosi is standing in the basement of Milk Bar under at least four dozen disco balls, discussing the mechanics of pancake soft serve. “Pancake is such a study in like, soft and squishy — not in a bad way, in a good way,” she says. This is why she is thinking this soft serve should offer no crumb — “crumb” being Milk Bar parlance for crunchy, clumpy flavor crumbles — and is instead advocating that a “caramelized, brown-butter baked effect” should emanate directly from the ice cream, topped with a maple-syrup fluid gel, “not that we would ever use the words ‘fluid gel.’”
It is just after 9:30 a.m. the day after the election. The weather is unseasonably warm, and the city is unseasonably dead. The night before, Tosi, who is 43, posted an impromptu edition of Bake Club, her Instagram pandemic project that is exactly what it sounds like. “It’s Tuesday night, it’s 6 p.m. in New York City, and I’m just thinking, I don’t know, maybe you’re at home, like, watching the news, feeling feelings!” she says with the nervous energy of a person who is indeed watching the news, feeling feelings. “Maybe you can tell by the look of my kitchen, when I have feelings, I bake!”
On this day, we are also baking — or rather, Tosi is baking and I am watching, or rather, Tosi will be baking, as soon as she finishes her appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, a brisk two miles uptown, where she’ll demonstrate Thanksgiving-themed Stuffing Croissants from her latest cookbook, which is also called Bake Club. “Do y’all mind walking?” she wants to know. “I would rather walk.”
There is nothing quite like walking in New York, where you can trot in your trademark Converse, looking aspirationally like a Gap ad, on an uncannily warm Wednesday in November, from the headquarters of your cookie empire to CBS Studios (stopping briefly at FedEx) and then loop back to your immaculate West Chelsea apartment via Uber, but only as a concession to the laws of time. Tosi had brightly tried to pitch her team on Citi Bike, a suggestion that was, much to my personal relief, ignored.
It is a cliché to say that successful people are successful because they work hard, harder than other people — yeah, obviously? — and yet Tosi does, all the time. Everybody knows this about both successful people in general and Tosi in particular, whose girl-next-door sunniness would mask her steely intensity if one were willfully committed to ignoring all other evidence, including her own repeated assertions that the world is divided into two types of people: “hardbodies” and “softbodies,” only one of which is welcome in her kitchens. What is special is that she manages to project the sense that, actually, she has all the time for you in the world.
Tosi has been thinking a lot about time lately. For two decades, she has been on an unrelenting schedule of her own making. “I used to be obsessed with output,” she says, gamely trying to explain every choice she’s ever made. “Maybe this is the story of it: I love to bake. This is what I’m gonna do for the rest of my life.” She decided to ignore the people who told her, a high-achieving straight-A, type-A math major, that baking was a hobby. She decided she’d move to New York City, because New York is where you prove that you can do it, that you’re the real thing. She went to culinary school and became a pastry chef and worked in the best kitchens, because if she was going to be a pastry chef, “I’m not gonna kind of be a pastry chef, I’m going to be the best possible pastry chef.” And so she got a job at Bouley, and then at wd~50, which led to Momofuku, which begat Milk Bar, where she has spent the last 16 years growing an empire of pathologically appealing cake.
And at some point, she began to feel restless. Maybe it can’t work like that when you have two kids who are 1 and a half and 3 and a half and a husband (Will Guidara, philosopher-king of hospitality and formerly one-half of Eleven Madison Park) whom it might be nice to see more often. “It was sort of like, This can’t be what life is,” she says. “This is not tenable. I’m a shell of a human.” It was the logistics of working parenthood, but it was more than that, too. “I was always close with my family, but something about getting married and then having kids brought me closer. I just want to spend quiet time together,” she says. “Isn’t it worth it to slow down?” she asks. “Otherwise, then it all passes. What happened to the last 16 years of my life? Girl, I don’t know.”
So Tosi did what many New Yorkers do when they arrive at a personal inflection point and must grapple with what is going to matter for the second half of their dream life: She moved to Nashville. More than that: She persuaded the rest of her family to move to Nashville. This is all the more remarkable, because nobody in the Tosi-Guidara clan — she is from Ohio by way of Northern Virginia; he is from Westchester — has any existing ties to that city, except for the fact that, her publicist reminds her, their dog, Butter, a soulful Greater Swiss Mountain dog, was born there.
But Nashville checked their boxes: calmer than New York and cheaper, but alive, with “a grit of creativity and imperfection” and enough transplants that they didn’t feel like interlopers. At least as important, it is home to a civilized international airport, from which they can be in New York City, where they’ll still have an apartment, in an hour and 45 minutes. “I was like, Let’s take a chance on our family, you know what I mean? Like, when was the last time you made a decision that wasn’t just for you, or for work, or for, or for, or for” — Tosi is fond of ending sentences like this, a gesture at the vast complications of this world. “For the first time, we’re making a really big move for these tiny humans.”
Her sister’s family landed across town in August. Tosi’s mother and stepfather, meanwhile, are in contract on a place less than a mile from Tosi’s future home, which had been Tosi’s request. (Her mother, Greta Tosi-Miller, a frequent presence in her work, says it didn’t take much convincing: “Oh my goodness, if that doesn’t turn a mother and a grandmother’s heart on fire, I don’t know what would.”) For the moment, they are staying in the in-law suite in the Airbnb where Tosi and Guidara have been living out of a pair of roller suitcases for the last two months while their future house is being renovated, which is a secret thrill. “I could live out of a cardboard box,” Tosi reports conspiratorially under the refraction of the disco balls. “I’m a nomad that’s been masquerading.”
Mostly, at this point, she jokes, it is the kids who live in Nashville. The kids, at that moment, were eating breakfast sausage and blueberries with their nanny, who is “the best freaking nanny ever” and took the gig despite the fact that Tosi and Guidara could answer essentially no questions about the cadence of their new lives. “It’s a real leap of faith for this human to decide she wants to watch these children,” Tosi enthuses as we trot across New York. And she has her mother, which in many ways was the whole point: to give her kids that time together, to give herself that time. “I don’t actually know what life will look like there, but right now, I’m just amped to get to spend more time with my mom, which is not something — and I love my mom — I would have imagined myself saying, like, ten years ago.”
The Nashville move comes as Tosi is reevaluating a lot of things. Last year, she stepped down as Milk Bar CEO to focus on the creative side of the business, a decision born from the feeling that she was failing everyone a little bit, all the time. And at the same time, she is considering Milk Bar’s potential future acquisition by what I had been told was a “major player in food CPG.” From the vintage of her home kitchen, where she is shaping caramels by hand — one of half a dozen recipes she’s making for an upcoming appearance on the Today show — she allows that the idea is “interesting to me.” Her goal is to reach as many people as possible, and giant companies can do that. She’s interested in creativity that scales. “We just need more of that dreaming and imagination.” Then she tells me, as evidence of what is still possible in America, that Reese’s is coming out with a peanut butter and jelly cup next year.
“I mean, it’s not a tomorrow thing,” she says of her potential acquisition ambitions. “It’s more like a cool dreamscape thing, of like, What else? What is this all for? What are you doing this for?” And one of the answers: to show up for people. “Showing up” is, for Tosi, a passion, a profession, a calling. We talk about this for hours before I have the courage to ask, exactly, what showing up is. “I think,” she says simply, “it’s trying to be a normal person in the world.”
She started Bake Club because it was a way of showing up for people when we couldn’t show up anywhere. It is still going four years later, despite the fact that people have mostly killed their sourdough starters and resumed their public lives. Installments are less frequent now, and she no longer streams in real time, but this is not because Tosi has adopted some kind of laissez-faire approach to her days. She is unfailingly, preternaturally present in everything she does. At one point, I casually mention, because Tosi has a particular knack for getting people to open up, that I had an impending flight with my toddler. She had a plan: What I needed was sparkly pom-poms and a plastic water bottle, and then what I should do is give the pom-poms to the baby, who can stare, mesmerized, as she puts them in the water bottle. “It makes no sense!” she’d raved. “It’s crazy!” Two hours later, she sent a picture of the pom-poms, to make sure I understood what I was looking for: “I can send you mine if you’re in a time crunch and can’t make it to craft store/Amazon in time!!”
A lot has been said about Tosi’s authenticity, the way her product, as much as naked cakes, is the sense that you could be her friend, too — that she is, despite her fame, intensely normal. “She’s absolutely genuine in her interactions,” her sister and new neighbor Angela tells me, but at the same time, “No one will all the way know her, right? I wouldn’t want to do that if I were in her shoes. But she gives enough of the essence of her.”
Recently, Tosi tells me, someone had asked her what it had felt like when she first became an on-camera personality. She didn’t understand. “I was like, I’m not sure what you mean? I’m the same person, just sometimes someone’s recording it. There is no transition — I guess you have to brush your hair? You can’t wear stripes?” I propose that for some people, there is an element of performance in the version of themselves they present for public consumption. They are still themselves, but heightened. For Tosi, that isn’t the case at all. She’s always all in, always ready to show up: What other way could she possibly be?
