When Christina Tosi was still working at WD-50, a now-closed Manhattan restaurant, she invented “Crack Pie.” That was years before she founded Milk Bar, the bakery chain responsible for cornflake-flavored ice cream, the most Instagrammable birthday cakes, and, of course, the infamous pie.
Now she’s renaming it. “Crack Pie,” meet “Milk Bar Pie,” a name that sounds about as bland as an expired pastry from the local grocery store. But some people complained that the old name was offensive to communities plagued by drugs, so it had to go.
In February, restaurant critic Soleil Ho called out Milk Bar in the San Francisco Chronicle. In a piece titled, “Words you’ll never see me use in restaurant reviews,” Ho denounced the term “crack.”
“In addition to being overly dramatic,” she wrote, “it seems really callous to write that a bowl of bean dip is ‘like crack.’ No matter how delicious something might be, its effect on me is nothing close to what crack does to people and their families.” Then she named Milk Bar as a perpetrator of this offense:
Other restaurants have responded to similar criticism. Last year, Michigan-based restaurant chain HopCat announced it would change the name of its “Crack Fries” to “Cosmik Fries.” That’s a better name than “HopCat Fries,” but still unnecessary.
In an episode of Netflix’s “Chef’s Table,” Tosi explains how the name “Crack Pie” came about. She was making dessert for other chefs at WD-50 for their “family meal.” The kitchen was basically out of ingredients that day, so she threw together a concoction with lots of eggs and sugar. When she served it, the other chefs started pushing their plates away because it was so good.
“This Australian cook was like, ‘I don’t know what you just did, but this pie is like crack. It’s crack pie,’” Tosi says.
The name obviously grew out of hyperbole, not a legitimate comparison to the most addictive form of cocaine. Tosi has succeeded creatively as a chef, and part of the creative process is naming her creations.
In Ho’s critique of food terms, the writer also attacked the term “addictive.” After she scorches the earth, chefs will not be left with many colorful ways to describe delicious desserts from which you can’t help but take another bite.
At least the pie is still around, but it’s too bad that it’s got a new name. With the politically correct rebranding, the dessert loses a little bit of its flavor.
