Would You Pay $25 For Toast?

Following on the heels of culinary inventions such as the cronut and crazy food trends like our collective obsession with all things kale and gluten-free is the new craze of “artisanal toast.” What used to be the first thing that even an utterly inept chef could learn how to whip up perfectly, using a few precut slices of wonder bread, a toaster and some warmed-up butter, is now experiencing a "moment." College students everywhere can finally feel justified for their culinary laziness.
Perhaps not all that surprisingly, this trend of artisanal toast can be traced back to the trendsetting capital of San Francisco, where local bakery The Mill and coffee shop Trouble started serving their own toast at $4 a serving. Apparently The Mill has been offering their own thick-cut toasted bread for around seven years, but it’s only recently that the trend has picked up steam and taken the nation by storm. This fad has spread out its hipster pretensions, reaching as far as Detroit, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and of course the Big Apple.
As artisanal toast’s popularity has grown, prices have followed, and in some places in LA and NYC, a single serving of homemade thick-cut toast and jam can end up costing you a humbling $7 a serving (just in case your $4 coffee didn’t seem steep enough). Some cafés have even started boasting a toast menu. That’s right -- a whole entire menu dedicated to just various types of bread and toppings that change daily. The whole thing may seem a bit ridiculous, especially given the fact that you can buy a whole loaf of bread for what you will end up paying for just a single serving of artisanal toast. Yet the high prices don't seem seemed to have had any real impact on the trend’s popularity.
There seems to be no end in sight for artisanal toast: high prices aren’t scaring customers off, and the endless possibility of toppings, from ricotta to cinnamon, to any kind of jam imaginable, probably means artisanal toast is here to stay. Just wait for Starbucks to get in on the trend. Pumpkin spiced toast anybody? No, just me... OK.
Some places, such as Café Gitane in NYC, have jumped on the artisanal toast bandwagon and started new variations like their healthy avocado toast that goes for $7.25 and, if I had to guess makes up around 90% of their customers' Instagram posts.
If you’ve got a hankering to try some of your own artisanal toast, check out Tallulah’s in Seattle, Café Gitane in NYC, Slipstream in Washington, D.C, or Trouble in San Francisco. If you can’t wrap your head around the steep prices, no worries -- after all, it’s just toast... I’m pretty sure you can make it at home yourself.
With demand not drying up and more cafés getting in on the action, artisanal toast is clearly here to stay. At least, that is, until the next trend catches on and our Instagram feeds are restocked.
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