My very first food memory
was when I was three or four.
It was a warm day,
and my mom had just picked me
and my sister up from school,
buckled us into the back
of her dusty blue Ford Taurus.
She was halfway out
of the school parking lot
when she pulled over to the side.
She strangely reached for her purse
that was resting on the dashboard,
started fishing around for something
until she found it.
Then she twisted around to us,
and she tore open a yellow paper bag
of slightly melted Sugar Babies.
(Audience murmurs)
She poured a few of the pellets
into each of our tiny hands.
Now, I want to be clear,
this was not a normal mom thing.
This was breaking several rules.
It was after lunch but before dinner,
we were in the car,
(Laughs)
we hadn't done anything spectacular
to be celebrated.
And Sugar Babies are, well, pure sugar.
I was so confused.
But I was a kid, so I took the candy,
and I started chewing.
God, I felt like I had just been inducted
into the coolest club possible.
The one that eats candy
on a random Wednesday.
(Laughs)
And then the world, it slowed down.
Everything faded.
And then everything sharpened.
There is only one word
for what I felt in that moment.
Magic.
Real magic.
Now, most people think
that’s kind of crazy,
three or four years old.
I don't remember anything
about my childhood for years after that,
but I remember that day,
I remember those Sugar Babies,
and I remember that feeling.
Now, most people think of magic
as a trick, right?
Abracadabra.
This seemingly impossible act,
put on purely for entertainment.
But I'd like to challenge that.
Magic, real magic is not an illusion.
Real magic is the feeling
when life transforms
from the ordinary into the extraordinary.
And not only is it real.
It is the very thing
that connects us to this world,
to one another,
to our entire existence.
It's the spark of a moment.
It's the feeling of believing,
of belonging,
of getting,
of being gotten.
It is the crack
that opens up our hearts
and reminds us to let light in.
Now I own Milk Bar,
this quirky American-style bakery
that I'll tell you
a little bit about later.
And I have found
that magic is often created
by breaking some sort of rule.
Like the "no sweets before dinner" rule.
Or wearing overalls
to a corporate board meeting.
Or simply daring to defy the expectations
of the people around us.
Now, as a kid,
breaking the rules usually
only got us in trouble, right?
But as adults, it's a different story.
Breaking the rules, pushing boundaries,
challenging the norm,
asking why, why not?
It does something to us.
It shakes us from sleepwalking.
And it makes space for magic to sneak in.
Now I was raised by matriarchs,
fierce heroic grandmas
who loved to bake in their free time.
And they knew good and well that food
was for nutrition and sustenance,
but they didn't care.
(Laughs)
They'd baked as their way
of breaking the rules.
They'd make batches of lemon bars
instead of casseroles
or one-pot wonders.
And they put those baked goods in baggies
and hand them out,
hand that magic out
to the most unassuming people.
The newcomer to the neighborhood,
the mail carrier or my personal favorite,
the receptionist at the dentist office.
(Laughs)
Now I knew what the receiving end
of magic felt like
from that Sugar Baby moment.
But witnessing what the giving part
of real magic did ...
It moved these people.
It was awe-inspiring.
And so I decided
that baking would be my way
of making magic in the world,
creating a moment and then giving it away.
A magic pyramid scheme, basically,
that I wanted, needed more of.
Only my mom and my grandmas
thought that baking was just a hobby.
But I knew it could be more than that.
So I moved to New York City
to become a professional pastry chef.
I went to culinary school;
I climbed the ladder of fancy restaurants,
making fancy desserts
to become the very best of the best.
Only ...
I never found magic in those beautiful,
delicate plated desserts.
I could only find my magic
in a cookie or a slice of cake
or a gooey underbaked pie.
And so when I opened Milk Bar,
that bakery that I was telling you about,
I decided I wasn't going to frost
the sides of a cake
like the textbooks taught me.
(Laughter)
I decided I was going to load
cookie dough with marshmallows
or pretzels and potato chips
and butterscotch chips and coffee,
tossing convention out the window.
I wanted people to eat birthday cake,
not just on their birthday,
but any day they wanted.
I knew that my magic came in the form
of these simple baked goods,
but I also knew that simple,
approachable, accessible,
nostalgic flavors
were my best jumping-off place
to create new desserts.
Almost as though fancy
were the enemy of delicious.
I’d go to county fairs to nosh.
I'd go to the diner
and order slices of pie
from that revolving display case.
I'd take french fries and dip them
in chocolate milkshake and dream.
And then I'd go into the kitchen
and tie on my apron
and start mixing up a new creation
rooted in something known
and safe and loved
but reaching far beyond
what anyone thought accessible.
Or approachable.
Or doable.
Breaking the banking rules
became my daily ritual.
I mean, who says a layer cake can't taste
like salty malty sweet pretzels?
I mean, my culinary instructors for one.
(Laughs)
"Watch me," I'd think.
And I'd take pretzels,
toast them in the oven
to deepen their flavor,
then grind them
into a powder-like consistency
and substitute some
of the cake flour in a recipe
for that pretzel powder.
It's pretty good.
When I was opening Milk Bar,
I knew I wanted to serve ice cream.
A rebellious kind of ice cream.
No surprise, right?
So I decided to buy a soft serve machine,
which for the record,
was very rebellious at the time.
I had to decide what flavor to make.
I mean, why do we only accept
chocolate and vanilla
as ice cream flavors?
I needed to come up
with something better, different.
Push that boundary.
I knew I had to come up
with a flavor of milk
that was different.
Milk is, like, the base
of any great ice cream.
So I sat out inspiration
at my 24-hour bodega.
Favorite place to go.
Because that's where we all shop,
that's where our simple
taste buds are formed,
it's the flavors we know.
Up and down the aisles till I hit it.
My favorite section
of the grocery store as a kid,
the cereal aisle.
Now as a kid, my mom and I
had an agreement.
I was a pretty picky eater,
and we agreed that I could have
as much cereal as I wanted
as long as I drank
all the calcium-rich milk
at the bottom of the bowl.
I mean, I thought it was highway robbery.
Does she not understand how good
that sugary sweet milk was at the bottom?
That's interesting.
That's a really delicious flavor of milk.
It moved me.
It made sense to me,
but would it make sense to other people?
Figured I'd give it a try.
So I went back to the kitchen
and made the equivalent
of a giant bowl of cereal.
I strained out all that delicious milk,
and I spun it into ice cream.
Put it on the menu.
And I've got to tell you, even now,
people stop me on the street
to tell me about their cereal-milk
ice cream moment.
"So good."
"Seemingly a little naughty."
I mean, how did I know
that was their flavor?
That's the flavor they eat
when they're wearing pajamas,
when no one's looking.
The flavor of their childhood.
These people will tell me
about every detail of the day.
They will tell me about the weather,
the company they kept,
the way that an ordinary moment
was transformed into something magical
with a simple bite.
I built my business with the same
"challenge the norm" mentality.
Rather than measure my business's success
by the profit or loss sheet,
by the average order value,
the other metrics that businesses use
to know if they're doing well,
I decided we'd measure our impact
by the twinkle in people's eyes.
By the "Oh, I can't put that down" feeling
that they had when they ate
one of our desserts.
I chose to put women
at the helm of my organization.
Because when I looked
around the hospitality industry,
people running operations,
folks holding CEO titles,
they were all men.
I mean, why?
I was raised by these fierce matriarchs
who handled business,
and I wanted my organization
to look like that.
I want to show the world
what women were capable of
and what a "bakery" could be.
Push back on that cute little box
people like to put us in.
And in turn, the rules broke for us.
The magic, our magic, got out.
Word spread without us spending
a dollar on marketing.
Rare in our industry,
we grew our business
without diluting the business.
I mean, we won awards
no tiny East Village bakery
has any business winning.
(Laughs)
It's pretty incredible.
Even today
I get to witness that feeling,
that same one that my grandmas
conjured up in my childhood.
We ship cakes all across the country,
we keep our doors open from early
in the morning until late at night.
It's insane for a bakery to do.
But we do it because we're
obsessed with it.
We're obsessed with what we do.
We teach classes, we share recipes
despite any concerns of copycats
or intellectual property infringements,
because that's what you do
when you benefit
from what came before you
and you plan on passing it
along long after you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When you know you're here
to give, not take,
and leave this place
better than you found it.
See, mom, you can bake for a living.
Pretty cool, if you ask me.
Now I don't have
the full equation cracked,
but I do know that it starts
with the decision to act.
My mom, she could have driven
that car home routinely,
but she decided that that day
would not be like the others.
She threw out that rule book
for just a second.
I carry this lesson with me,
that every day has within it hundreds,
thousands of opportunities
to create real magic.
Only, they disappear.
Unless you reach out and grab them.
Thank you.
(Applause)