Sweet + Salty

Have you ever wondered why chocolate costs two dollars? It starts as a bean, right? A bean that gets extracted from a pod and then fermented somewhere near the equator and then processed into, say, a Whatchamacallit or a Toffifay or a Dove bar and sold near the POS system at a deli on the Upper West Side or a 7-Eleven in Alhambra or Tokyo? Why is it so cheap? Why is it so sweet? Does it hurt your teeth?

Have you ever been to Confectionery!, a, well, ahem, confectionery shop in the East Village of Manhattan? Have you noticed that it always smells really good? Like good flowers and chocolate fumes and some kind of weird nonhippie incense that must cost a bundle to source? If someone were to wander into this shop at 440 East Ninth Street, would they be able to get a chocolate bar for two bucks?

Have you ever been to a superfancy restaurant? The kind that cost five hundred bucks for dinner and culminate in a flurry of chocolate bonbons of all different colors, angular and bulbous shapes and flavors that typically creep into an amorphous blob of cocoa-adjacent after three bites? Do you even want to shotgun a bunch of thinly coated ganache after a grand buffet of lobster, truffles, and foie gras?

Now, the chocolate confections at Confectionery!, are they on par with the toniest of black-tie, hospitality-included, Michelin plaque–decorated restaurants? Would you think I am nuts if I tell you they are better? That the flavors are more focused and crystallized? That the shells are more lithe? That despite the fact that the ganache filling of, say, one of Lagusta’s tahini meltaways is completely void of dairy, vegan as all get out, it rivals and tackles the creaminess of a heavy cream–addicted chocolatier in Dallas or midtown? And these candies, while being outrageously interesting and craveable, and made entirely with coconut milk as the “dairy,” don’t taste a drop like coconut? How is that possible? Is Lagusta an alchemist, holed up in the woods of New Paltz, and shuttling down bonbons to sell to the socialites and aging hard-core kids of New York City who may or may not even be vegan themselves? Are the candies just that good?

Why does Lagusta’s chocolate cost a little more (sometimes a lot more) than those 100 Grands and Reese’s at eye level at a Wegmans checkout? Is it because she sources ethically sound chocolate base material, stuff that isn’t ambiguously draped in slavery and oppression? In 2019, is it still revolutionary to say you don’t have to fuck people over to survive? Is a ten-dollar chocolate bar a luxury item? Or the right price for the right thing when made right?

Somewhere within the self-congratulatory world of high-end food cookery, is there a lobotomizing machine that the sous chefs and pastry assistants and chefs de cuisine must hook up with probes to their skulls to make sure that exactly 0.0 percent thought is put into using raw materials that do not shred the environment and the folks and animals that live in it?

Do you want to learn how Lagusta Yearwood pulls this shit off? Let’s read, man.

—Brooks Headley owner/operator

Superiority Burger

Coconut-Rum Truffles (here)

As a kid, I wanted the weird candies no one likes: those buttercream mints that melt cloyingly in your mouth, watermelon bubble gum, anything with sour flavors. Chocolate seemed stupid. I’d eat a Snickers for the caramel and nougat, or a Butterfinger for the peanut butter, but mostly I wanted the clean hit of pure sugar.

Technically, we didn’t eat sugar in our household, because my mom was a hippie who embraced every countercultural value she could get her hands on. I grew up in Phoenix because my parents’ Volkswagen van broke down on the drive to California. Most Phoenicians have similar origin stories. My parents joined a community of burnouts who couldn’t quite get it together to make it to the hippie promised land, but my mother wasn’t a burnout (my dad is another story). She was a journalist who worked as a theater critic most of my childhood. She could never bring herself to enforce any rules or discipline—it didn’t square with her antiauthoritarian nature. Plus, she was busy working. So, we ate our sweets in semisecret.

We always had chopped-up raw vegetables around, carrots and green bell peppers and sprouts, and some hummus or cottage cheese. Ritz crackers. Peanut butter. My mom, kicking off her mom-pumps and dingy soft bra and exhaustedly changing into a faded tie-dyed sundress after work, mostly said we could “graze” for dinner, halfheartedly positing it as a treat—have whatever you want! We barely ate meat at home, just hot dogs when we had cookouts a few times a year. Our skimpy, overgrazed fridge sometimes had not much more in it than a jar of rancid wheat germ, margarine, a few foraged oranges from a tree down the street, and limpid celery. Ants on a log was an entire food group. When things felt fancy, we replaced the peanut butter with slicks of cream cheese, unwrapping the foil-wrapped brick lovingly.

I have no memories of anyone ever making dessert. Our birthday cakes, the glorious exception to all rules, were always supermarket ones with fat puffy roses, lurid food coloring staining shortening frosting–scalloped edges. We shoved our face into them and emerged baptized in fluorescent frosting, vibrating with the twinned happinesses of a birthday and sugar overload. We guarded the mounds of frosting decorations like snapping wolves, wouldn’t let anyone eat the corner pieces, fantasized about flavors the rest of the year.

Mostly, we ate junk from the liquor store on the corner of our block. My dad sent us there a lot with permission slips to buy beer. This was Arizona in the 1980s and ’90s and no one had any problem with this system. My brother and I would lug home a sixer of whatever was cheapest with fifty cents’ worth of candy balanced on top, a Snickers bar or Hydrox cookie mini pack, watermelon Bubble Yum or, my favorite, de la Rosa, a peanut marzipan round packaged in a cellophane wrapper with a delicate rose printed on it. De la Rosa is a perfect confection. Just crumbly enough, just sweet enough. Mega-simple. Gorgeously packaged. My mouth is watering right now.

I ate homemade food and dessert, sort of, at my dad’s mom’s place, a doublewide trailer in a trailer park with a swimming pool half an hour from our house. My grandmother had grown up desperately poor, and the world of packaged food was a constant source of joy and revelation to her—her pantry was stocked layers deep with store-brand cans, boxes, packets. She kept a coffee can filled with bacon drippings on the counter at all times. Lots of squishy white bread my mom warned us against as if it was Chernobyl waste.

My grandmother was a giddy, fun-loving, alcoholic racist who called me Gusta with the hardest g you’ve ever heard. She got DUIs in her pickup truck until her driver’s license was taken away, but she didn’t mind—she just made Jimmy drive her to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift stores instead of driving herself. She could never believe her luck at having found, after five tries, a husband who didn’t beat her up. Jimmy worked as truck driver in a mine that dynamited the mountains that encircled Phoenix. His wardrobe consisted only of Hanes white T-shirts and Levi’s. He came home at night and amiably drank twelve or fifteen Budweisers until he gently passed out. When I announced my newfound vegetarianism to him, he softly said, “Wheeeeeeeeelllllllll,” drawing it out for an impressively long time.

My grandmother subscribed to a lot of magazines. Sunset, Woman’s Day, Redbook. My mother and I pored over Taste of Home, joyfully mocking the down-home, Midwestern aw-shucks aesthetic, with perforated recipes to clip, columns for recipe exchange requests, “My Mom’s Best Meal,” and “Country Kitchen Tours”—full-color spreads of beaming housewives showing off their collection of hen-themed salt shakers and pot holders. My ultrafeminist, nondomestic mom shook her head at the seeming anti-intellectualism and family obsession, so I did, too. But the recipes fascinated me. It would have never occurred to me to make any of them. They seemed like strange equations that it wasn’t my place to solve. It was my first exposure to food writing.

I got heavily into animal rights when I was fifteen. When I got deeper into the animal rights world, my mom joined me, going to meetings and giving up meat herself. Phoenix wasn’t a liberal town then or now, and the tiny animal rights scene was close-knit and fierce. Within a few months of going to meetings, I knew I had to go vegan. So we did it, my mom and me. We mail-ordered lip gloss from the PETA catalog. We’d drive to the health food store in Tempe, forty-five minutes away, to get tofu (what did we do with the tofu? I’m afraid to remember). We slipped up a few times, but then I kept a mental picture of suffering cows from John Robbins’s classic Diet for a New America (the dude was heir to the Baskin Robbins fortune and went vegan! I love this book still). I’d call up whenever I wanted a Snickers. And just like that, I was vegan.

By the time I was seventeen, I was president of Arizona’s biggest animal rights group—though technically my mom was copresident because the bylaws said the president had to be at least eighteen. By then, we were both vegan. Everyone deep into the animal rights world was. You couldn’t be a serious activist and eat dairy, and all I really wanted was to be a serious activist.

When I met my ex-partner, Jacob, my freshman year in college in 1997, his appetite for edible treats of all kinds was already deep and, at times, all-consuming. For two decades, we celebrated everything big and small with sweets: grocery-store sorbet eaten from the pint on the floor of the house we just closed on; lavish cakes made by our best friend Maresa to toast our anniversary; hand-pounded mochi made at the Buddhist temple down the street to celebrate the New Year; an endless parade of birthday cakes at restaurants, at friend’s houses, at home with just the two of us snuggled up together, spooning up good wishes for the year to come.

After college, I went to culinary school because I wanted to learn to make vegan food as decadent and sophisticated and transformative as the best “regular” food available. I wanted to show that not eating animal products was an ethical choice, and that vegans can care about—and be as knowledgeable about, and as wildly passionate about—food just as much as any meat-eating modern chef trying to cook from a personal point of view. We’re all trying to tell a story through food. Mine is of decadence and indulgence, of the best flavors and seeing how far I can push them. It’s also about still trying to live as an activist, to use my job as a way to advance my ethics.

After culinary school, I started working as a private chef around Manhattan. “Private cheffing” is a lucrative slash soul-crushing business. Once, during an initial meeting with a new client, I asked whether her kitchen was stocked with such basics as olive oil and salt and pepper. She airily said she thought so, sure, probably—well, go take a look? I walked into a completely bare room and opened the refrigerator to reveal fifty or sixty bottles of nail polish, a rainbow of soldiers lined up neatly in the door compartments. “That’s a twenty-year collection, honey!” the woman yelled after me. I made her the same salad for six months in a row, a daikon and steamed shiitake thing with apple cider vinegar that she’d read was slimming.

At one point, I started just cooking out of my house and delivering to my clients. Like all my businesses, this meal delivery service—which would become my full-time job for the next nine years—was born with no business plan, capital, savings, investors, health department permit, or business sense. The only thing I had was a desire not to work for someone else and the endless energy of someone terrified about not being able to pay next month’s rent. It was enough! That skittish, panicked energy propelled me through practically a decade of fifteen-hour days. In time, I rented a commercial kitchen and worked my way through John Waters’s catalog, obsessively watching and rewatching Female Trouble while chopping 40 or 50 pounds of onions at a time in one small room with twelve gas burners bubbling away at all times. The meal delivery taught me how to cook.

Meanwhile, in 2003, Jacob and I made some vegan truffles as Christmas and Hanukkah gifts for our friends and families. I ripped off a truffle recipe from Martha Stewart Living and subbed soy creamer (so processed! It was a different era. I was a different Lagusta.) for the cream and coconut oil for the butter. Everyone loved them, so I started making them on my days off, taking orders among my friends and family and eventually setting up a primitive website for them. Soon, I was shipping hastily packaged boxes of truffles across the country every week. It would take me another five years or so of gleefully shipping chocolates that would arrive in horrifying condition to refine my chocolate-shipping techniques. Amazingly, we still have customers from those days.

Our shipping operation is still laughably small—just two tables crammed with repurposed cornstarch packing peanuts (mostly given to us by our local health food store—none of us can pop in for some dried mango or scallions without leaving with a car full of air pillows and packing peanuts), endless rolls of “quiet tape” (Always Splurge on the Quiet Tape: a cardinal Lagusta’s Luscious rule reinforced every time we have to endure the strangely ear-splitting screech of cheapie packing tape), compostable ribbon (it costs more than gold but it’s not made with toxic dyes—plus our ribbon guy, Ken, is a riot on the phone), tissue paper, compostable ice packs we buy by the pallet, and custom shipping boxes (printed right in New Paltz!).

All that came later. By 2010, I was exhausted by the weekly marathon of organizing customers for the meal delivery service, grocery shopping, cooking the food-mountain, washing the mountain of containers, then piping, rolling, dipping, packaging, and shipping a few hundred truffles on my “days off.”

Wary of giving up my sacred John Waters–watching solitude but knowing I needed help, I’d hired two sous chefs: Veronica and Maresa. (Today, over ten years later, Maresa is my best friend and business partner and Veronica runs the New York City shop that Maresa and I co-own. Employee retention is my finest accomplishment, by far.)

When I opened the door to interview Veronica—the first person I ever interviewed—I knew immediately that she was perfect. I still chase that feeling in interviews: does it feel as it felt when I first met Veronica, or Rachel, or Kate? Hiring people is a sort of falling in love (later on, I did fall in real-deal, true-blue love with Kate, but that’s a story for another book, ah).

Veronica was seventeen but said she was eighteen. She had just shaved off a Technicolor Mohawk. She didn’t and still doesn’t know how to drive, so her parents drove her forty-five minutes to my dinky yellow kitchen every week and sat in the car, reading, for eight hours. Veronica can tell you anything you want to know about early Dylan, Van Morrison, Japanese avant-garde/modernist poetry, Leonard Cohen, what films are currently at Film Forum, what exhibits are worthwhile at literally every art museum in Manhattan (the free admission days of which she has planned her days off around). Veronica skews heavily Luddite when it comes to computers and social media. Veronica was homeschooled, can you tell?

I’d met Maresa at the Rosendale farmers’ market, using the immutable law of the universe known as Two Vegans Converging on a Small Space in a Small Town at the Same Time Every Week Will Eventually Become Best Friends. She was selling produce for her neighbor and cupcakes she’d made. Every week, I bought a cupcake, and eventually we started talking, then she started showing up at my kitchen. I said I didn’t need to hire someone (I did; I was just scared to be a boss to two people at once), so she said she would work for free. She worked for free one day, and that night, I offered her a full-time job. She and I worked long days together every day for the next six years until I fired her so she could work full-time at her own baking business, conveniently located in the back room of the Lagusta’s Luscious production space, where she rents a postage stamp–size mini-kitchen and works literally around the clock with a tiny crew of fiercely devoted bakers just as intensely focused as she is. In 2016, we opened a joint sweets shop in New York City, Confectionery! with her French macarons and baked goods and Lagusta’s Luscious’s confections.

Kate

Rachel

Back in the yellow kitchen, once Vern and Reesey were trained (“Stop stirring so much! Let it get a little browned.”—there, you’ve taught someone how to cook.), I gently slid into a slow-motion overwork-induced nervous breakdown that had been building for a decade. Things weren’t quite as fiscally tenuous with the business, so I allowed myself to realize how exhausted I was. During this period, I mostly sat in my car parked in front of the kitchen, paralyzed with deep-burn exhaustion, dreading hauling the hundreds of pounds of produce inside, sharpening the knives, beginning the cycle again.

The deeper I went in the food world, the more I thought about chocolate. With Jacob’s chocolate-loving palate at my side, we’d begun tasting the new breed of craft chocolate that had been springing up. It took me a while to taste anything but bitter flavors, but in time my taste buds opened up, and a chocolate bar became a box to unpack: a dozen or so flavors gradually unfolding on my tongue.

Veronica

When new people start at the shop and they can’t taste the port in the Port-Walnut Truffle or whether the Corn Bar has enough corn, I’m always annoyingly on them to keep tasting, keep tasting, keep tasting. It sounds kind of like a joke when you first start, but your job depends on your knowing these flavors. Recipes are, to a certain extent, junk. Too many variables. Your tongue has to be the final say. The only real difference between food professionals and everyone else is crazy amounts of tasting, and trying to learn a little more every time. I love when someone realizes they know exactly how the Corn Bar should taste, and that without a little more smoked salt, it’s crap.

Maresa

Gradually, I learned what I liked and didn’t: sour flavors in chocolate itself were out (my tongue belongs to sour candies for life, but sour chocolate, ugh), which cut out some prominent American bean-to-bar makers. Super-high-percentage (read: bitter) chocolate with a big honking sour/dry/astringent nose turns me off immediately. Bean-to-bar makers are so proud of using fewer and fewer ingredients in their bars, but chocolate bars made from just cacao beans that maybe for a second glanced at a bag of sugar, with no vanilla or luxurious emulsifiers like soy lecithin let into the building at all, feel unbalanced and goopy in my mouth. Not like a treat. I felt like a failure in the world of hipster 90% chocolate until one day I realized: who cares? There’s plenty of chocolate out there. I kept tasting and making truffles. I started making caramels and toffees and brittles and bonbons. I still love candy more than chocolate.

Alexis

In December 2010, Jacob and I drove to our friend Conor’s wedding at the Cloisters in upper Manhattan. On the drive, I was whining about not wanting to cook so much every week and Jacob said, “What about if you opened a chocolate shop?” So, I did. I was thirty-two and had been working two full-time jobs for ten years. Running a small chocolate shop sounded like a dream.

Until 2016, whatever I happened to be doing at the time for money was named Lagusta’s Luscious: private cooking in someone’s home, making chocolates, savory food, whatever. I regret the name. I figured I’d be a one-woman show, and having employees work for such a ludicrously named business makes me feel sheepish. But my friend Noel, who I met working at Bloodroot, a feminist collective restaurant in Connecticut, named the business, and when I see it through her (fierce 1970s dyke-style) eyes I love it: a deceptively cute name for a high-minded, very personal cottage industry.

Jenn

Lagusta’s Luscious, chocolate shop version, opened on Jacob’s birthday, June 28, 2011. Maresa and I were the only employees. We didn’t plan on opening a shop, exactly. We put in a counter and two metal metro shelves for bars and barks and bonbons, but we didn’t really talk about customer service, or how we were going to handle helping customers while producing product. It was surprising to us that customers came. In retrospect, that seems strange. We were selling chocolate. In a small town. With no other fine chocolate options. Where we’d built up our reputation as chefs and confectioners for years. People came.

When we opened, we had trouble keeping fifty or seventy-five pieces of chocolate in the display case (now we have a few hundred in the case at a time and about a thousand in reserve, impatiently waiting their turn). We’d regularly hand customers truffles that had been dipped in chocolate about three seconds beforehand. We made to order everything for our website orders: if we got an order for one box of pomegranate truffles, we made eight pomegranate truffles, put them in a box, and walked that box to the post office. We were always late, always rushing, always understocked, never had any money, always took on more than we could handle. Maresa regularly banged on the post office door at 5:05 p.m. until they accepted her armload of packages (this trick has never worked for me. On the other hand, I’ve never tried it. Maresa is from a large Italian family from Staten Island and gets away with lots of things—from earrings to semolina bread procurement—that I’d never have the guts to attempt. She’s my best friend and I’m still scared of her. Once, I asked her whether she was popular in high school, because I’d vowed that I would never be friends with anyone who was popular in high school. She stared at me. I stared at her. “Wait,” I said. “You were a bully in high school, weren’t you?” She stared at me. “I didn’t let anyone push me around, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said, and went back to weighing out sugar).

Erika

Jenna

Our hugely inefficient working style is laughable to think about now, but I know our current systems and production methods are still small-batch and home-style when compared with other chocolatiers. It doesn’t bother me. The more efficient we get the bigger we get, and I don’t want to get much bigger. Plus, the business has built-in inefficiencies because of our commitment to unfashionable concepts, such as collective decision-making and obsessively scrutinazing our supply chain. But I like running it this way, and it’s more fun, and why do we have to keep growing, anyway?

I’ve identified as an anarchist as long as I can remember. Not the bomb-throwing kind (yep, there’s another kind!), the kind who believes that the goal of being human is to own one’s destiny, not to put it in the care of the capitalist state. Anarchism is about power: who has it and who doesn’t. I wanted to keep all of my own power and renounce power over all others. I started working for myself because I wanted to own my life. When I started realizing that apparently “owning my life” now meant hiring a bunch of people and (as I saw it in my bad times) owning their lives, too, I had no idea how to function. My core belief was that no one should be forced to let a dumb top-down hierarchal structure determine their life, they should be allowed to live wildly according to their own plan.

In retrospect, I was bonkers. It took me about four years to come around, though. I’m a slow learner. I wasn’t a very good boss during those years. If I can provide good jobs to my community, I owe it to my employees to stop being wishy-washy about being their boss and just learn how to be good at it. So, I have (been trying).

I use two principles informed by anarchism daily in the business: (1) the starting point of any decision should be informed by more than just capitalist principles; and (2) organization without repression, which is to say: we can run efficiently and well without oppressing those around us. (Of course, we’re attempting to use a by-definition weakened form of anarchism within the framework of a completely wrecked capitalist world order. But still, why not try?)

By the fall of 2014, things were going great. I’d made my peace with being a boss. We were gearing up for the holiday season. I was figuring out how to make Drinking Chocolate Magic Spheres when my mother called me. Magic Spheres are hollow chocolate balls with marshmallows trapped inside. To make Drinking Chocolate Magic Spheres, you put the spheres in a mug and pour hot milk (of vegan variety) over them and whisk and magic: a hot chocolate with marshmallows is born. Except that getting the technique to make the spheres right was taking endless practice. (All magic, culinary or otherwise, has a recipe behind it that took hours or days or months or years to perfect.) I didn’t pick up my phone when my mom called because I had chocolate all over my hands. A little while later I listened to the message. Her voice was faux-light. I could tell right away it was bad. My mom and I were never mother and daughter. We were always best friends. When I was a kid and she used to say that, it annoyed me, because I wanted and needed a mom and that wasn’t her strong suit. But once I was an adult, our closeness was the most important relationship in my life.