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(Finally, some actual food at this table!)
It’s 8 a.m. on a Sunday in Albuquerque, and patience is a virtue rewarded with pastries.
For regulars of The Burque Bakehouse, patience = pastry is a formula tested weekly. This being the opening weekend of the 51st International Balloon Fiesta, even greater patience is likely required as locals would be joined by tourists skipping this morning’s mass ascension in favor of the bakehouse’s many permutations of flour, butter, sugar, and various accouterments.
I’m staying a few blocks from the bakehouse at a casita my brother is renting, and after a few days of hiking and backpacking around the New Mexico/Colorado frontier, I’m keen for the slow Sunday ritual I came to know when I was still a local here a year ago. The annual Greek festival neighborhood congestion which had complicated finding a home for my car last night has vanished this morning. I make the walk from my brother's place to the bakehouse in my Birkenstocks with a pair of black Bombas socks on, a highly fashionable signifier of the changing seasons. Goatheads, still fresh and green and as fucking infuriating as ever, get stuck to both my birchs and bombas as I cut across a patch of non-concrete sidewalk that’s gone unattended for – probably – decades. When I arrive at the bakehouse, the queue of aspiring pastry patrons runs south from the order counter, turns east around the building, and stretches toward the Sandias past the street entrance to the bakehouse’s parking lot. When one of the few spots in that lot is vacated, and the car’s driver attempts an exit to the south, people in line fold like an accordion at either side of the driveway to make room for the car.
Based on the length of the line, I estimate that procuring these pastries is likely to take up nearly an hour of my morning. Do I really want to spend an hour of my infinitesimally short existence standing in a queue of strangers waiting for what will only amount to a few bites throughout my day?
Of course I do. There is beauty in this world, and it is edible.
A couple in their early 60s or late 50s (based on their peppered gray hair) cross the street to their Tesla, each holding a to-go coffee cup and a brown bag bearing The Buque Bakehouse branding printed in black ink. They open their respective doors, place the goods in various safe places within the car, and remove their jacket layers of the carefully assembled outfits. Both are wearing head-to-toe combinations of expensive and well-made clothes coordinated in color swatches that echo the autumnal season. I wonder if they have other events today in which they will step out into the public eye and have their fashionable sensibilities appreciated. My suspicion is no, they won’t.
Ahead of me in line is a father in his mid-30s and his son, maybe 9 or 10. He has the Hylian shield from the Zelda games tattooed on his left calf, complete with Triforce of Courage in yellow ink and the Loftwing in red. That’s the father, of course. The son is talking about a recent trip to the arcade with some friends. He’d won a 2ft tall Yoshi figurine (assuming his hand gestures when saying “It was this big!” weren’t exaggerated), or maybe it was a stuffed toy. He won it in one of those metal arm games that always seems rigged to let the prize go right before it drops into the retrieval shoot. Apparently, a friend had wanted it so bad that he’d stolen it from our narrator. Somewhere along the way – my eavesdropping strayed for a moment thanks to the chatter of a group of girls further up in line – the Yoshi prize had been beheaded. The boy seemed unbothered by the theft or the eventual decapitation, he was just glad to have a story to share with his father.
A few spots in line ahead of the father and son, a group of four girls are chatting – some loudly, some softly – in English with accents so neutral in their Americanness I can’t place their locality with any further specificity. While their conversation betrays them as 1st generation children of Korean immigrant parents, their aesthetics plagiarize the current fashions of their paternal peninsula’s current trends. Their outfits are layered technical creations, platform black & white sandals, parasail fabric pants with big pockets that seem to have never been unzipped, crossbody bags over which their jacket layers hang, and tight athleisure-type crop tops. One has died her hair platinum blonde. She adjusts it often, tossing her mane which hangs beyond her shoulders from side to side. She’s the loudest. Another wears her jet black hair in a ponytail threaded through the sinch spot of her black Adidas ballcap. She seems to be the quietest.
Two spots behind me in the line, which has advanced about 6 feet so far, an Indian fellow in his 40s idles by walking in small circles. He is silver-mustachioed but otherwise clean-shaven. His iPhone is cased in that brown leather one that folds closed to hide the screen and opens to reveal it along with whatever four or five credit cards or forms of identification one opts to shove within the case’s sleeves, and he’s using it in a way that suggests he’s still waking up. It’s in his left hand, which he reaches across his body to his right ear, but not quite pressed up to the ear, more so resting on his right shoulder while he tilts his neck down toward the speaker. His right hand rests, without contributing to the effort, in his right pocket. He’s wearing dark gray dress pants and a mustard platt button-up with open-toe sandals. I’d recognize the non-workday outfit of choice for an aging Indian patriarch anywhere – my host father in Delhi and his friends all had their versions of the same model. Through his iPhone speaker, and at a volume loud enough for any neighbors in line to plagiarize should they so choose, his wife lists her preferences for when he does at last reach the counter. Plagiarism here being optional, assuming they can piece “almond croissant,” “that pistachio thing,” and “olive loaf,” out from the rapid, cell-phone-fried, Hindi. He affirms the wishes of the voice on the phone with a wiggle of his head and the accompanying “theek hai, theek hai,” then folds its case, pockets it, and goes back to his idle waiting like the rest of us.
Patience runs out for a pair of comfortably dressed women ahead of me. They step out of line, walk to their car parked up the street, and drive off empty-handed. It was probably t-minus 20 minutes till pastry time for them. Perhaps they’re tourists. Perhaps they have something better to do with their own short existences. Not me.
An academic type, a University of New Mexico graduate student perhaps, rounds the corner and strolls past the line with a bag of pastries danging from her arm, holding a coffee in one hand and her phone in the other. There’s an air of smugness about those who arrive 15 minutes before the 8 a.m. opening time and those, still in line and still waiting, who arrived at the 8 a.m. opening time. Or maybe that’s just how it feels to those of us standing in line when someone walks by having already completed the acquisition phase of this morning ritual. She probably just parked on this side of the street.
It’s only 8:30 at this point, surely it’s too early for them to have sold out of my favorite thing, right? That’s what we still-in-waiting folk say to ourselves to quiet our anxieties while the queue makes progress millimeters per minute. Perhaps the equation should read: patience * arrival time = pastry.
Slow though it may be, progress does come. I’m at the turning point in the line now, rounding the corner of avenues Broadway and Hazeldine. Probably 12 parties ahead of me still. The father with the Zelda tattoo and his son are mock-fighting.
“I like, cannot relate to all the immigrant children,” I hear the platinum blonde Korean American girl say to her friends. It’s one of those lines you overhear that grabs your ear with such force that you miss the following sentences while trying to make sense of it. Something about TurboTax or scholarships or financial aid maybe. “I just cannot relate to other immigrant children,” she says again, bringing her point – whatever it was – full circle. I catch her continuation, “Having to figure out finances and all that, my parents figured out all that stuff on their own.”
“No!” Another ear-catching exchange from further up the line.
“Do not say no!” exclaims, with a careful blend of pleading and exasperation, the male voice of the couple now at the order window. They began their ordering with a stock inquiry about some form of seeded bread, of which there is apparently no more stock.
The female-presenting half of the duo has short curly hair cut in a mullet, transparent frame glasses, turquoise studs in her earlobes, maroon new balances, the white tee of what I assume is a local band, and Carhartt pants which bear the wear and tear of a laborer, or of a cheap pickup at the thrift store. The male-presenting half, whose protest to the bread inventory news grabbed my attention, is wearing a big blue hoodie of unbranded origin, baggy sweat pants, Adidas slides I know intimately from my time as a soccer player throughout my teenage years, and his hair is a yet-to-be-addressed-today mesh of balding and bed head. His eyes have the wide-open intensity of a hungry (perhaps hungover?) morning person. He’s nodding his head with depth and speed as if jostling his brain into gear like one would jostle a stubborn gear shift in an old manual transmission. The cashier stresses the importance of arriving at opening time on Thursdays if they want the seed bread they’d come in search of. “It’s our most popular bread you see!”
“Do you still have that pear bread thing?” One of the softer voices from the group of 1st generation Korean American girls asks, their contingent now positioned at the order counter. “You do!” chimes in the loudest upon confirmation from the cashier. In a chorus, they collectively order two of those, before individually listing their desired pastries and coffee orders. The platinum blonde’s exaggerated interactions at the counter come from over the shoulder of her three friends, her laughter at some of the intermittently audible banter with the cashier causes her to stumble back and hunch over in a laugh that lasts less time than seems worthy of such grand physical movement. The girl in the Adidas ballcap taps her card and selects how much tip to leave.
Just two parties ahead of me in line now.
“I’m gonna get 3 carne adovada danishes because we’re gonna start freezing them,” starts the 6ft-ish ginger fellow in his early 40s wearing Ray Ban shades, a tan colored 5-panel cap out from under which scruffy hair connects to a scruffy beard, worn-in gray-green Levi jeans, and 3/4 gray zip up top. It’s the start of what must amount to a 3-digit order. He leans on the counter, closer to the cashier than anyone else so far. Based on their conversation which extends beyond the order at hand and into the lives of this patron and cashier, the two must have established a repertoire after visits recurring most if not every weekend dating back what I imagine to be a few months, even years perhaps. “Well, I am excited you guys are gonna get a break,” says the ginger at the end of their repartee. The Burque Bakehouse must be taking some time off after the Balloon Fiesta.
*A note to readers, that’s my deduction based on eavesdropping, and should not be taken as fact, feel free to direct inquiries related to hours at Google.*
Now it’s the father and son at bat. “What can I get for you guys?” asks the cashier.
“Well, go ahead,” the dad says to his son, who launches into his order. It’s less a list of one-of-these and one-of-those and one-of-that, more a “what’s this: and “what’s that” and “ooh that sounds good, let’s get one of those!” The dad remarks he was afraid the bakehouse would be sold out of most things by then; it was approaching 8:50 by this point.
“When you’re here early you get whatever you want!” says the cashier with a laugh, his disposition to the father seems equally jovial as with the son. He’s wearing a green apron over a brown button-up that looks warm enough for a Balloon Fiesta morning. His beard is graying, midlength but well-groomed in its shape, and his hair tells a similar story from underneath a mesh-backed trucker hat with a croissant illustration stuck on its front. His smile is full, his laugh feels just as deep as it should be for so much customer service at such an hour on a Sunday, and his patience proves as long as the customer line, fielding the son’s final question of the order:
“Are these pastries here on the counter real or fake?” the son asks.
“Oh, they’re real! Those fake ones are super expensive!” With that, they move on, and the cashier's smiling eyes move to me. My turn to order.
I’d been so busy typing on my notes app about the people around me, including the cashier now expectantly waiting for me to say something, that I’d yet to consider what I actually wanted.
Best to decide in the moment. Just don’t hold up the line.
Decide in The Moment actually means deciding on multiple things as you see them, regardless of intentions relevant to self-control.
Naturally, I order the 3 most interesting-looking things from the spread on the counter, and a chai latte.
The “most interesting” is subjective here. Everything looks interesting. Danishes, croissants, pizzas, french and cinnamons toasts, bread, scones; not every pastry under the sun, but a damn good number of them with unique flavor combinations that, when read aloud, felt like reading an Iron-Chef-level baking challenge.
“All the fun stuff!” says the cashier. He must share my definition of interesting-looking.
“Impossible to keep any order here below 3 items,” I concede with a smile. He tells me it’ll be $24.39 or something close to that where the numbers behind the decimal point make no logical sense in the context of a bakery menu pricing structure. Taxes I guess. I tap my card and leave a tip.
My interaction at the order window concludes with “Order number 55,” as the cashier hands me a slip with 55, October 8, 2023, 8:55 AM, The Burque Bakehouse printed on it. “We’ll have that ready for you around the corner, thanks so much for coming by!”
There are 3 permanently fixed stools beside the pickup window, one blue, one yellow, then another blue. I sit on the blue one nearest the window and continue scribbling notes on what’s happening around me to pass the time.
“I’m gonna wreck you, dude,” says the dad to his son with a smile. The son has been impressively patient through this 50-something-minute process and is now swinging the arms of his hoodie at his dad's midriff as the are-we-there-yet phase of patience begins to take root. Within 30 seconds the dad is holding his son upside-down over his shoulder. Another 30 seconds later he is accepting their bag of pastries, a cardboard tray containing two beverages, and asking his son to take charge of the two baguettes.
“55!” calls a girl's voice from the pickup window. She’s wearing a gray hoodie under her green apron, her black hair in a functional ponytail with some strands left to flow down behind her ears. She’s gorgeous in the way that every single person on earth would probably agree that she’s gorgeous. Her eyes don’t raise to meet mine when she hands me the bag of pastries or chai latte. “Thanks so much,” I say. I get a “Have a nice day,” in return from over her shoulder, she’s already turned back to her workstation, locating order 56 for the Indian fellow who is back on the phone with his wife, updating her on what he did or did not get in Hindi.
The Burque Bakehouse often makes its way into discussions of weekend plans among my friends here in Albuquerque. Questions of who is going when, have you tried the new seasonal pastries, or did you hear they’re bringing back that kimchi thing? Of course, personnel comes up on occasion, just as it would when discussing a favorite barista or bartender. Walking down the trail from Wheeler Peak on a Saturday, scheming what our Sunday would hold, Ben took the opportunity to tease our friend and my former roommate Dylan.
“You’re the only one in Albuquerque handsome or interesting enough to flirt with her, lad,” he said, that cheeky smile across his face, speaking of course about the girl in the pickup window. It doesn’t take much for the hopeless romantic in us three cinema nerds to conjure an imagined Burque Bakehouse rendition of Zero and Agatha’s love affair for the youngest in our ranks. Dylan’s more of a film history purist though, so it’s probably an old French movie he’s picturing instead of Wes Anderson’s most acclaimed work. Regardless, whenever we tease (or encourage) Dylan on the romance front, he tends to blush and soon changes the subject.
My walk north along Broadway back toward Ben’s casita is enriched by a skyline sprinkled with hot air balloons. A sticker on the traffic lights pole says “I’ll be back soon” with a picture of Jesus smiling and pointing back at me. One street down, the next pole offers the same cheerful (ominous?) message.
I’ve finished my chai by the time I arrive. I sit on the swinging bench out front of the one-story adobe home, enjoy the warmth of the rising sun on my face, unpack the bag of pastries, and remind myself what I ordered.
A carne adovada danish – that’ll be breakfast. A pizza romano slice covered in dill, parsley, parsnip, and mushrooms– that’ll be lunch. A huckleberry cinnamon croissant toast. That’ll be a treat unbound by time.
I pull the carne adovada danish from its sleeve. My mouth waters to meet the impending kick and tang of red chile. Eat slow, I say to myself, beautiful things ought to be savored.
The first bite. Through the flakey exterior of puff pastry to its softer inner layers. Through the roof of melted cheese. Through to the rich red chile pork. Through, all the way through to the center of the still runny egg yolk, positioned like the decadent heart of the danish.
In that single bite, I am reminded why this hour-long escapade of eavesdropping and exercising patience, available to the in-the-know each Thursday through Sunday, is a ritual as worthy of faithful commitment as any I’ve ever known. And while I’d prefer that the line not grow any longer, I hope that everyone has a Burque Bakehouse experience, or one like it, of their own.
December 30, 2023
Reflections on a year of globetrotting and learning, some of the music and art I've most enjoyed, and a few other things worth sharing in this overdue edition of the Family Dinner Newsletter.
November 6, 2023
A not so short short story meandering through memories, the multiverse, and what the future may hold, plus some lovely ideas from others.
October 26, 2023
A poem about Rain, a Sunday morning spent in pursuit of pastries means overlapping with all walks of life, Works I Love & Why but make it a workout, and more!
October 19, 2023
The first iteration of the Newsletter features a short story on Works I Love & Why, delving into one of my favorite reads of 2023 and its inextricable link to one of my best friends.
October 13, 2023
Hi, welcome to the Family Dinner newsletter! The name “Family Dinner” is a nod to the magic I most often encounter around the dinner table. This first entry is an exploration of the idea from which this project will grow. Thanks for being here, I hope you enjoy it.
