How I Built This with Guy Raz - Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

For Christina Tosi, baking wasn't just a delicious childhood hobby – it was a daily creative outlet and a way to blow off steam. After college, she went to culinary school and honed her pastry technique at high-end restaurants in NYC. But she also craved the opportunity to make unfussy, nostalgic desserts like the ones she grew up eating. So in 2008, Christina opened her first Milk Bar bakery in the East Village, with the help of her mentor, Momofuku chef David Chang. Soon, people from around the country were calling her up, begging for her gooey pies, confetti birthday cakes, and pretzel-potato-chip cookies. Today, Milk Bar has spread to 16 locations, and reportedly brings in tens of millions of dollars a year. This show was recorded live at The Town Hall in New York City. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better your home might be worth more than you think find out how much at arbb.ca slash host i just remember my blackberry kept buzzing and buzzing and i was like what is going like did the bakery catch fire is my family okay what could this possibly be and i

had all these voicemails and i have a my favorite voicemail was from this woman in Kansas City who I think maybe was someone's grandma and she was just like well I heard you know Anderson Cooper talk about this crackpot and I just I'm never going to make it to New York so like would you mind shipping me one and it was like are you going to tell her are you going to call her back and tell her no because I was not going to call her back and tell her no and we now have an online business where you can email us and daddy is like when opportunity knocks what do you you going to say like, not today.

When it's time to rise to the occasion, you rise. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today,

how Christina Tozies' passion for pie and cookies led her to open milk bar, a multi-million dollar sweet shop that's reinventing nostalgic American desserts. We absolutely absolutely love food stories on this show. When we had Alice Waters on, I could have listened to her talk about strawberries for the entire hour, or spent the whole interview with Jenny Britton Bauer

hearing about the molecular structure of her rich, dense Jenny's splendid ice cream. There's a special creativity about food and also something else. Unlike a tech device or a product that require sophisticated machine tooling to build, food stories just seem a tiny bit more accessible, almost like you hear it and think, I could do that. Now, before I get carried away, let's be clear about one thing. Coming up with an amazing burrito or burger or ice cream is hard, but it's even harder to produce it at scale and keep the quality high, especially if you are as obsessed about the details as Christina Tozzi. But the funny thing is, if you've ever seen her milk bar pie or her compost cookie, you would never know. Because,

in some ways they look like the least obsessed over desserts in the world. The cookie is a jumble of oats and butterscotch and potato chips and pretzels. The milk pie is a gooey mixture of butter and brown sugar and cream and eggs. Her cakes are unfrosted on the sides. But the moment you bite into any of those treats, I'm willing to bet you will freak out. Because that's when you begin to understand Christina's level of precision, the exact amount of chocolate. or cream or vanilla. The perfect crumb on the cake.

These are the products that Christina Tozzi sells at her milk bar bakeries. But what she's really trying to sell is joy. A moment. A small and relatively affordable indulgence. All of this from a kid who was raised on junk food and ended up deciding to learn to become a pastry chef. For several years, Christina worked in some of the best restaurants in New York, until she became a logistics manager for David Chang.

David's one of the most influential chefs in America who opened a chain of Asian-themed restaurants under the name Momofuku. And with his encouragement, Christina eventually founded Milk Bar. The bakery has since spread to 16 locations across the country, with a cult following and an estimated revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. And if you're one of those people who love the leftover milk at the bottom of a bowl of cereal, Christina was perhaps the very first person to take that milk and turn it into soft serve ice cream. Christina Tozzi joined me on stage at the town hall in New York City a few weeks ago for a live conversation.

And one of the first things I wanted to know was, how do you milk a cornflake? You're very hip on culinary technique. That's exactly how we make cereal milk. You just milked it with little teeny fingers. It's like from the farms of Ohio to the streets of New York City. You have to be very deft with your fingers, right? So let's start with where you grew up outside of Washington, D.C. What kind of kid were you?

I mean, were you like super academic, sporty? What do you remember about being a kid? I was a mix of all those things. I was very much an academic because my parents would be like, Toosies don't get anything but A's. and I was active. I remember loving running at a young age, and I just have always had a lot of energy

and just found places to put it, but I was always a curious kid. And you actually grew up speaking Italian, right? Yeah. My dad's side of the family is from Northern Italy. He's first generation American, and I didn't realize, I didn't even occur to me that that was interesting

or strange or different. It kind of just was. I grew up with, like, romance languages, for sure. And as a kid, I mean, because we'll get to this a second about what you majored in, which I'll just, you know what I'm just going to tell everybody, you majored in applied mathematics and, what was the other thing? The Italian language. In Italian, right.

That was a slam dunk. That totally foreshadows compost cookies. Yeah, the path is so straight and narrow. So when, I mean, so when you were like a teenager or, you know, I mean, were you, was baking even part of your life? Were you? Baking was part of my life from a super early age. I grew up in the home kitchen.

And it wasn't with the nuance of technique or like culinary wisdom. It was just, I was the youngest. And that was like kind of where childcare happened. My mom was a working mom. So it would just be like, go hang out with your grandmas. Go into the kitchen because they're making dinner. I grew up in the suburbs. And, like, you didn't, food wasn't a thing back then.

Like, you didn't go out to eat. Like, maybe if I read all my books for school, I was, like, a bucket member and went to Pizza Hut to get, like, a pan pizza. Or if we were really, really, really good. As teenagers, we would go to, like, Baskin Robbins on Thursday nights. That was, like, if we were very well-behaved. But everything else happened at home, and cooking was fine. I was never really that into savory food based on my diet

that I'm so happy you shared with everyone. You were basically, you grew up on craft mac and cheese and hot dogs and Doritos, right? Yeah, and lima beans with ranch salad dressing. That's been a hidden secret for a while. That was your vegetable. Okay. But I, so I, like, grew up being trained to be super studious and super yielding, and the place that I, like, resonated with most was when we were making cookies or baking brownies or lemon bars or just, like, co-hound. home baked goods, but it was the place where I kind of like broke the rules and acted out was

like stealing a little bit more cookie dough and my grandma wasn't looking or like the little, the little nibbles that I knew I wasn't allowed to have. But that was also what resonated with me most because we would bake every single day or every single night. And it was less about having dessert on the table and more about these baked goods bringing us into the community that we lived in. But as a teenager and when you eventually went to college, like, I'm imagining that like baking was just something you did. It was just something you enjoyed doing.

But it wasn't like, I'm going to do this because you went to, you start out at the University of Virginia studying applied mathematics and Italian. So I went to engineering school at UVA first and then I was like, science, what's this about? I like math and I like to bake not really seeing the connection. Did you envision your life as a life of somebody who was going to do something with applied mathematics, like being an accountant or an economist or something like that? My very practical mother after like my first year of college was like, great.

I got home, you know, like first day of break and she was like, great, like when are you starting your summer job? And I was like, what are you talking about? And she was like, let's go. And I got a job in an actuary office. And I was like, oh, I don't know that this. resonates with me. And I was raised by these people that were so passionate about what they did for a living. And they always raised us to follow that passion. I think they just would have preferred that it was like as an actuary. Yeah, right. As a mechanical engineer. Yeah. And so did you, I know that after a year at UVA, you dropped out.

You decided to, it wasn't for you for a variety of reasons. And you, you kind of decided to go to Italy for some time. And, but that, again, that wasn't like, there wasn't like this sort of revelatory, like, epiphany in food, or was it? No, it wasn't. So I figured out how to transfer from UVA to JMU, but instead of going to JMU on campus, how to enroll myself right into the study abroad program in Italy, because the thing that I, that I knew for sure about myself was that I was a wanderlust and I still am today. and I just started over that like time frame of being in my like late teens and early 20s,

just starting to be like, who are you? And whenever I'd get an answer to one of those things, I'd start to collect the answers. And I want to be out in the world. I feed off of that. So I went to Italy, not under the guise of food, under the guys of education. But I got so much more out of it. And so you finish James Madison, and I think in 2002 you get your degree in applied mathematics in Italian. and what was your thought?

Like, what did you think you were going to do at that point? Did you have an idea? I was a little short-sighted. I basically took as many courses as possible to get out of the formal education process. So I graduated in three years being like, I got to get out of here. I'm over getting straight A's. And I know I don't actually want to do anything for a living with these things. And so it was kind of on the eve of graduation that I was like, uh-oh, I can't.

go home. I sped so fast through this formal university education, but I don't want to do these things for a living. And so I just asked myself the simple question of like, all right, girlfriend, and like real talk, what is it that you're passionate about that you want to make into a living? And it was this one thing that I just did every single day habitually without thinking about it, and it was bake cookies. You would bake cookies, like. You would bake cookies, like, like even in your dorm room? Yeah. It's very common when you are like super studious. You work really hard, you study all night,

and then like your way to sort of like shed the weight of expectation of stress is to bake. It's an outlet. And for me, it was like a social outlet because I would, I'd bring it. I'd bring it every day to high school. You'd ask people to go into high school with me. I would show up every single morning with something baked. So when you finish college, you start the gears in your head start to think, Okay, maybe there's something there, and you decide, all right, I'll move to New York and sort of find my way?

I knew my answer was baked cookies, and so I took a step back. And I was like, okay, am I going to do this at home? There's no way I'm going to do this at home. And I knew I wanted to get out, and I was always drawn to New York City. And so I kind of said, like, all right, I've been doing this formal. education thing for a few years. So I already feel behind on this newfound dream. So like, I got to go to the like most fast-paced, most well-known food place. And I got to figure out how to make cookies a profession. So I enrolled myself in culinary school to become a pastry chef. That's like what you

would call a formal cookie maker. And at least in my term, that was my translation of it. And I moved to New York City, having only been here for a few hours once as a teenager, and just hit the ground running. So how did your parents feel about that? Because you went to, I think it was a French Culinary Institute to learn how to become a pastry chef. How did your mom and dad feel about that? I didn't give them much time to react because I knew how they would feel about it. And I knew who I was and I knew what made sense to me. And I wasn't asking for permission. So I think I told my mom two days before I got on like the Chinatown bus and with a suitcase full of like cleaning supplies and a sleeping bag and a change of clothes and she wasn't happy but I imagine on some level as a child

they also realized that there was a stubbornness about me and that I did everything they asked me to do and that it was my life to live and what did you think about about culinary school and Was everything that you'd hope for was this like transformational, amazing, intense experience? I loved every minute of it. I mean, part of it's kind of goofy because you're wearing a uniform. And your uniform is like a white chef's coat and a kerchief that you have to tie a certain way. And a white paper toke that kind of makes you feel very goofy. The second you like lean over, it falls off your head.

And the uniform, I didn't go, I went to public school, like the thought of wearing a uniform, that someone tells you how to wear. Like, the things I wear were always an expression of what I was. So there was part of it that was militaristic and curious to me. And then the other part of it, I realized very quickly that with culinary school, just like any part of my education, you get as much out of it as you put into it. And that's when it really started clicking. I was learning all of this technique.

I was eating a lot of chocolate. I was making friends. And I was on my path. I was going to culinary school by day. I was working at restaurants to pay the rent at night, and I was never home because who can really afford any livable space in New York City. What did you do after you graduated? What was your first job?

So I got my first job while I was in culinary school. I was a pastry cook at Boulet, and I, like, just wedged my way, my foot in the door when I was still a student because I was like, again, like, I'm behind. I was like in my 20s and was like, I got to play ketchup. So I basically convinced them to hire me as an intern and then convinced them to give me a full-time job the second that I graduated. And I was working like the fine dining four-star hustle,

which is basically working six days a week. My schedule was from 11 a.m. until 3 a.m. and on the sixth day, you had to work a double, which meant you had to go in at 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. to get your seventh day off. Wow. And what would you do? Like, what was your job?

In a kitchen, you have a prep list. And so you look at the prep list. And it's a list of things that you need for the day based on the desserts you sold the night before, the number of covers that you were expecting in terms of reservations. Like in the morning, when I worked at the double, I would always have to make this white chocolate moose, pipe it into this beautiful, tiny little cup and then make this green tea jolet. And it was with super expensive green tea. And you had to boil it to a certain temperature. It could only sit there for two Mississippies, and then you had to whisk in the agar, and if you messed it up, which I messed up plenty of times, you would really get hammered for it.

And even now, to this day, the smell of green tea. There will never be anything green tea flavored on the menu at milk bar, because it's like the most beautiful PTSD, even though I so appreciate why other people love it. For me, it's something completely different and personal. So I imagine, like, what was like? Because kitchens can be, like, we've all seen cooking shows and have read stories about kitchens. Like, they can be pretty, you know, nasty places, right?

Really kind of brutal places. What was it like there? I mean, you know, there's a hot restaurant, lots of people coming in. Was it, you know, hostile, tense, uncomfortable? Or was it just messy? All those things. Yeah. It's tough.

I mean, it was tough. It's tough work. It's a tough pursuit. And somehow I was totally built for the ride of it. On some level, I think my dad raised me enough as a tomboy to be like, let's go. Like, let's go. We're not like, we're not crying over spilled milk. We're not like, I see, you skin your knees.

You're fine. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. And to not think about the barriers that we're, were put in place to just like, are you here? Did you show up? Do you mean it? Nothing that's worth it is ever easy. And I didn't think about anything other than that. I just charged forward. So, I mean, I'm just curious while you were at Boulay, I mean, you are learning how to be a pastry

chef, right? I mean, this is sort of like you are in the trenches. Were you already at that point thinking, yeah, you know, this is the thing I think I want to do. I want to be a pastry chef. I want to be the pastry chef at some famous restaurant. Did that start to become an ambition? Or was it more just you were enjoying what you're doing and you were doing it? So my first year was just about getting to a point where I wasn't getting my butt kicked at some, if not every point of the day. And so for me, it was this pursuit of learning, almost like in the Sisyphian complex of

just like you're just rolling the boulder up the hill and thinking about like, oh my okay tomorrow how am I going to do it better how am I going to do it faster quicker more technique oriented and after about a year of it is when I really started to see opportunity not just meeting the standard but seeing opportunity um you were there for a couple years and in 2005 you went to go work for wd50 was kind of a legendary molecular astronomy restaurant in here in new york um famous chef wiley duprein but you didn't go there to to work in the kitchen right So I left Boulet because I had learned everything about that technique and that style. And when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I was starting to think about who I was in food,

not just learning how to perfect someone else's techniques, but who I was through food. And I knew I was all about like the home bake good, but I also knew I was super curious and adventure seeking. And so I did the same thing. I stuck my foot in the door at WD50 and said, I want to intern for you as a pastry cook until you have a job opening and then I will happily wedge my way in there. And it got to a point at WD50

that my role was beyond pastry cook. I was helping the chef think about hazard analysis plans with critical control point elements too. You listen to it. Hazard analysis critical control point plan. This is basically food safety, right? Because every restaurant, especially in New York, you're going to get hammered.

if you do some tiny thing wrong. Yeah. So you got sort of brought into help Wiley, like, come up with a food safety plan for his kitchen? I'd say, hey, chef, like, is there extra credit I can do? Because I was raised to be that person in school. And at first he was like, what are you even doing? What are you talking about not understanding that lens? And he was like, I need help with the health department.

I'm trying to figure out what this has a plant. What is it? Yeah. They just are telling me I need it. He was a super smart, super savvy guy, but there were a lot of walls up that he had to figure out how to break down. A restaurant had to have a hazard analysis,

critical control point plan. If using a certain technique, we're going like super dorgy food cake. What's a technique? The cooking technique is called suvids, so under pressure, creating an anaerobic environment by sucking air out of a bag.

And then was gently boiling it. And so to use that technique, you needed this health safety plan in your restaurant? You needed this like 60 page analysis of everything from you bring the watermelon in and who's receiving it and who's taking the temperature and is there a potential bacteria contamination step and if so is there a kill step all the way through it landing perfectly placed on your beautiful plate. All right. So you help write this thing. In the meantime, are you doing any cooking at the restaurant? Oh yeah. I'm working as one of two pastry cooks.

in the restaurant. And that was like a super hot restaurant, right? At the time, like, it was getting press. Oh, yeah. It was it. It was probably the last great restaurant in New York City. That's... Wait, that, that, oh my gosh, no, stop. That existed before, like, eater and food blogging and access to these great restaurants existed online. It was, it was the restaurant that only existed in this beautiful way in the underbelly of the New York food scene by word of mouth. It was in the Lower East Side. No one even went to the Lower East Side back then. And were you getting a chance to experiment at that point, or were you still sort of doing what you were told to do? So I found a way to both experiment through the ideas of my pastry chef at the

restaurant and learn so much about technique and flavor manipulation and how to bring the flavor of cornbread into an ice cream base. And then I started realizing because I didn't really have a kitchen in New York City in my own home that if I just showed up to work early, I could just like make my homespun dessert before my shift started, work through the crazy technique-driven demands of the shift and then serve my like brownies, chocolate chip cookies for family meal. And that was my first, like, step into serving my baked goods in an environment of discerning culinary minds. So when the staff, like, the restaurant staff usually eats like four o'clock, right? Before the restaurant opens at 5.30, whatever, the family meal, you would just bring desserts.

I would just bring up whatever I had showed up early to bake. And that really is the beginning of what would become your most famous dessert, right? Right. How did that happen? What's the story? It was a Sunday. And the fact that it was a sunny is an important part of it. It was a Sunday. I was showing up to work early as I always did. And I was going to make something for family meal. That was my routine. And I was looking in our fridges and I was like, I don't really have anything extra for me to work with. And it was a Sunday. And in restaurants, you don't get deliveries of supplies of your raw food goods. on Sundays. And it's like, what am I going to make? What am I going to make? What am I going to make? And my favorite cookbook at the time

is still today is the joy of cooking. It's like equal parts dorky and historical. And there's like not really pictures, so you have to really be into the words. And was deep into the pie section, and I fell in love with the story of chess pie. And chest pie is this pie down south that you make when you don't have enough apples

to make apple pie or peccas. to make pecan pie, you make just pie with like the southern twang said over and over again, chest pie. And I loved the idea of like, it's kind of pie with the filling and none of the other probably better for you stuff. And I love the idea of putting just whatever you have together, the basic pantry items, butter, sugar, vanilla extract, eggs, and whisking it together and putting it a pie shell and baking it. And I was never one for really following the rest of the recipes of another cookbook because I was always tinkering. And so I kind of, I purposefully didn't measure anything to sort of tasted the batter,

put it in the shell, baked it, went off to do my normal pastry-cooked duties. Never really set. And the meal that you make for family meal is an important one because it shows your peers, what you're made of, what you think tastes good, what you cook for them is almost maybe more important than what you're cooking for your guests. Not really, but in theory it is. And so I was embarrassed that day because I thought, this is the first time I'm going to put up a family meal dessert that I'm not proud of.

It didn't even set. That's just, that's everything about that as bad technique. Threw it in the fridge, didn't think about it, threw it up for family meal at 4 p.m. And kind of went and hid in a corner and ate my meal quickly. And before I knew it, there was just like loud ooze and awes and strange things. And I was like, I'm going to get a fight in the kitchen, what's going on? and these guys that I worked with were just like just buzzing all over the place like what is this what'd you make and I'm like thinking that I'm hiding in the shadow around this dessert instead they're freaking out about this like gooey buttery delicious mess of a pie that they named crack pie and we have since renamed for other reasons but it was it was this thing that lived

in the underbelly of New York City dining before I even opened milk bar. All right. You're still at WD50. You're working as a pastry chef. But I guess around 2005 or 2006, Wiley gets a call from David Chang, the famous David Chang, founder of Momofuku. He's having some problems with the health department. Because he wants to do, right?

He's trying to do suvite as well. These guys. And they keep shutting him down, right? Yes. These guys. Well, 2006 also, Noodle Bar, David Chang, like, y'all probably didn't even know who that was. Noodle Bar had just opened. Newdle Bar had probably been open six, seven, eight months at the time.

But Dave called Wiley and was like, dude, I'm getting in trouble for the same thing that you just got in trouble for. He was being shut down by the health department because he wasn't able to show a plan with his... I mean, what entrepreneurial cook? They don't teach you the stuff at culinary school. It's like never seen before technique, and therefore the idea of writing this crazy hazard analysis plan, a great chef is not typically a bookworm on that level. And so Wiley knew like clockwork that I'd be like, chef, it's my weekend. What do you got for me? And he'd be like, I need you to go uptown, which was the East Village.

I need you to go uptown and help my friends, Dave. And I was like, cool, great. So when you got, when you met him, did he say, hey, can you help me write this hazard critical analysis control point plan, whatever it's called? He was like, I did a bad thing and I need your help. Because if you know Dave, you know like, and most of us that are in it is personal to us. So when someone comes in and like threatens to shut down your business, it's everything we've got that's in it. And when someone threatens the one thing that you've been working so hard for, it's like, uh-uh. And he kind of lost it on them. He kind of lost it on them. And it was my job to clean it up.

So you started building a plan for him? Yep. And what? At some point, he said, hey, will you come work with me? Yeah, I was in this interesting transition period at WD50 because I knew it was time for me to move on. I didn't see myself as the pastry chef there. fine dining, it felt different than who I was as I was figuring out my voice and food. And on top of that, there was this magnetism to Dave and to what he was doing and to how we got along. It was like we spoke the same language without ever having to say a word.

And what were you doing there? Because you were not cooking, right? No. He was like, do you want a job? And I was like, well, what would the job be? And he was like, I don't know. you figure it out and there was something about the like

I don't know this or that really like whatever is needed and also we'll figure it out like the openness of it was like perfect where do I sign up at that time I don't think Momofuku had a pastry chef they didn't even a dessert menu dude it was the wild wild west I don't know that there was even a girl

anywhere in I don't even know that there was a girl in the kitchen They were a bunch of dudes in a tiny little space. Like going for it, blood, sweat, and tears. The thought of dessert, right? At that point, it was dainty. It was time-consuming. It takes up space from an economic standpoint. Like, it was kind of in their mind just a waste.

So, I mean, did you do the same thing at Momofuku? Like, when they had family meal, would you bring desserts and stuff like that too? Yeah. Crack pie and all these things? Yeah. I think the first time, because Dave was like, what is this crack pie that, like, Wiley keeps telling me about? I was like, I don't know. It's just a pie. It's pie. And he was like, I want to taste it. And I was like, okay. And I made it. I think I made him a miso crack pie once. I would just make whatever and bring it in. I mean, everyone, who doesn't like baked goods? Everyone loves the person that brings baked goods in for work.

Yeah, of course. Everyone loves that. But, I mean, it sounds like this was really an outlet for your creativity, right? Like, it really was just something you loved doing. Because it was at this time where you kind of came up with the idea of playing around with cereal milk and making panacotta. So, because cereal and milk, of course, would loom large in your life eventually. Yeah. How did you figure out how to extract milk from cereal?

Well, guy. I was starting to think through desserts differently and starting to really understand and flex these muscles of like rule breaking in the baking and in the dessert space. For me, the fine dining part of desserts that I have always struggled to resonate with were the ones that feel like they're so far over your head

or they're so luxurious that there's no like connection to what your taste buds know to be like sweet and guilty and indulgent and naughty and all the reasons why we love to eat dessert. And so I was thinking through like basic desserts. Panicata is a basic dessert. And I was like, oh, what a missed opportunity. Like buttermilk or lemon. Those are great ideas. But like, wouldn't it be cool if it was flavored something different? And I just, I started to like use the weird isms that I'd solve a math problem with where it's like, what's the lowest common denominator? Milk.

What can I flavor this milk with to speak to people? And I would just, my favorite thing to do as a kid and still my favorite thing to do today is just walk the aisles of the grocery store in New York City terms. We don't really have grocery stores as much as we have bodegas. And I would just walk the aisles and be like, could you be a flavor of milk? Could you be a flavor of milk?

I got to the cereal aisle and was like, I mean, this is always a flavor of milk. I was like, it's a good idea or a bad idea. Yeah. Right, because, I mean, who doesn't remember that as a kid, right? Like, cap and crunch, crunch berries, right? Amazing. Well, everyone has their favorite flavor.

Yeah. Cinnamon toast crush. Come on. Like, this was where when I made cereal milk for the first time, I did the same things. I did with the pie where I was like, this is either a little ashamed, not really certain, because when you're trying to find your true voice,

you're not even sure that it sounds right when it comes out. But it was seeing the look on people's face. It was seeing the look on Dave's face. It was seeing the look on my coworker's face. You basically took milk and you infused the milk with like corn flakes, right? You just poured corn flakes in there and just let it sit there. I mean, it's more than that, but that's like the basic of it. Strained it and made a pan ofata out of that.

And then served it and you said, Did you tell them what it was? No, you just said, hey, I've made this. I just gave it to them. I said, taste us, tell me what you think. And I kind of scuttered away because. And it was cornflake milk? Yeah, made a little toasticle on the corn flakes, little seasoning.

And they came running after me and were like, what is this? What is this? It was like they knew what it was and they can't put their finger on it. Yeah. And it was seeing their reaction of like, you get me, you got me. what is this? I know what it is. I can't put my finger on it.

My eyes are popping out of my head. And I just want to give you a big hug that I was like, this is it. Wow. Like, this is special. Right? Because cereal, I mean, nobody was taking milk and infusing it with cereal. I mean, it's sort of a little weird.

I mean, it sounds silly to say now, right? It sounds like a no-brainer now, but, right? Or you can say that everyone, was doing it. We were just doing it over like in our holy pajamas. Yeah, exactly. Delicious. Yeah. No one was setting it into a panacotta, swirling it into a soft serve or thinking about it through that lens. Yeah. So at some point, David asked you, hey, can you, I want you to make dessert for the restaurant. He just decided, let's try this. Let's make dessert. I think he saw in me someone that always needed to be in.

over my head to be moving. And I think at the same time, he knew he was building this amazing magical thing in Momofuku, and that in order to continue to be taken seriously, he was going to have to take his restaurant empire seriously. And like it or not, that includes desserts. So what did you make? Strawberry shortcake.

But it wasn't, you know, it wasn't, it was like the best dorky approach to strawberry shortcake. What was it? it was this super high-fat butter shortcake that had a little bit of corn powder in it for flavor and buttermilk and I would roll it in confectioner sugar before baking it because that was something my grandma would do with her cookies when I was a kid and so it gave this incredible like salty but sweet and sharp and buttery and crumbly and tender and I'd take these tiny little gems of tristar strawberries and I'd macerate them but in a certain ratio of sugar and I would just a little bit of

cherry and balsamic vinegar to make the strawberries taste like something you had never had. And I'd put sour cream and the whipped cream because it needed a little bit of an edge. And I had all these things that like, it couldn't just be strawberry shirt cake. Don't you guys want that? Yeah. Sounds so good. I mean, I couldn't just make us strawberry short cream. But I had to make something.

And it was that it was being pushed to make something to say, who are you on a place? You're not standing behind somebody else. You are the person making the dessert that brought out a different side of me. So I guess around 2008 there was this opportunity, right? David had he had a restaurant, another restaurant, and the neighboring laundromat or whatever, they move out. Yeah. And what, he comes to you and says, hey, Christina, why don't you open like a dessert place next door?

Was that, I mean, is that how happened? I was making desserts for a few of the Momofuku restaurants at that point, but the only place that I could make the desserts was in one of the restaurant kitchens. And the only, like, that, guess what? That happens at 3 o'clock in the morning when everyone else goes on. When everyone else goes on. Because there's no space. Right. And so there would be a point where he was like, we got to like, we're going to find you space. We're going to find you space. And he knew that I love to bake.

He knew, I mean, I would still bring in baked goods. So he's like, I have an idea. We got to take over this laundromat space. I think you should take it. I think you should take it. We don't want somebody else to move in to the block. I think you should take it. You'll still make desserts for us,

but then you'll just, like, do your own thing on this menu. So it would be a bakery that had like a door, storefront, but you would also make desserts for his restaurants. And it would be like kind of part of Momofuku, but also sort of separate. Yeah. I was like, great. Let's do it.

Wow. Like that. Yeah. And so he was going to basically kind of sponsor this thing, and you were going to go in and kind of run it. He was like, great, go figure out how to sign the lease and like, let's go. One's going to open. Wow. And at that point, I'm just curious because you were so, I mean, you know, you were so experienced, right, but still really young. I think you're 27. Did you go through the process of like, I don't know, creating a business and putting together a business plan and like getting lawyers and all these things? No.

Guy. No, cook would ever do that. No, I was young and I didn't know enough to know any better. I just said yes and jumped. It was a cool opportunity to try this. Yeah, I was like, great, that sounds great. That sounds like something exactly like what I would like to do. And I'll go do it. I'll just go do it.

When we come back in just a moment, how Christina prepared for milk bar's opening day and what happened after Anderson Cooper ate a piece of crack pie. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2008, and Christina has just signed a lease to take over the space next to Momofuku's second restaurant and turn it into a bakery into Milk Bar.

And when it came to the look and feel of the bakery, it was a big departure from fine dining. The original, like, inspiration for Milk Bar was it's going to be like a modern day take on Dairy Queen slash Baskin Robbins. But I'm also going to serve a bunch of baked goods because that's just what I love to do. I'm curious about the aesthetic of it because I've read that, I've read it described as part punky Brewster, part Lisa Frank, which I love. I think it's awesome. Like, what's amazing? I mean, did you think, did you have a kind of a vision in your mind of what you wanted it to look like and feel like? Or did that just kind of happen organically? Aesthetically, it didn't even occur to me to think of what it would look like, but I knew what it would feel like. I knew that I wanted to open this quirky American-style bakery that served cookies and cakes and pies and soft-serve, and that I wanted it to hold space in people's lives.

I was like, the world doesn't need more bakeries. We don't need more chocolate-trip cookies. We need more of the theory of that, but in a way that, like, inspires and is sticky and is a place that anyone can come, and people can get, like, just feel a little scene, get a little wax. And so everything was just like brass tax, stainless steel, you know, the cheapest furniture we could find, scrape and paint off the side of an exposed brick wall. And then all of the other aesthetic from that, like our neon milk sign was literally a, the storefront is a quarter of the way into the block and people can't find it because I refuse to pay for like permitting and drawings to put a sign outside. And I was like, but if I hang a really big neon sign in this creepy hallway, I bet that would work. And I was like, okay, well, what does it say? Milk, I couldn't fit all of milk bar without becoming awkward.

So I typed milk on my laptop and highlighted it and was like, you know, if it's modern day dairy queen, it should have like a little bit of that nostalgic brush grip medium. And then I was like, what color is. So you just use an off the shelf, off the shelf font, brush grip medium. And then I was like, what color is it going to be? And it's like, okay, well, taxi cabs in New York are yellow. The stoplights are red and green. The little crosswalk eyes, you know, like flash is white.

And it's like pink, that'll stand out. That'll get someone's attention. They'll at least see the light. And they did. And what were you, when you opened up, what were your first products? Had they all been tested out at Momofuku? Yeah, I would still just make fan. family meal the way that I always had. So I would, some of the things that are still on the

menu at milk bar today, like the cornflake chocolate chip marshmallow cookie was somebody burnt the cornflake crunch that was used for another dessert. And I was like, well, we're not going to throw this away. We were like raised by parents that like waste not want not mentality. So I was like hide it in a cookie, put some chocolate chips in it. And we were using marshmallows for some other like R&D moment. And so I was like just use the rest of the marshmallows. It was kind of just like a hodgepodge cookie and we made it and put it out and it would people freaked out and we were like okay that that's going on the menu by the way i read that i read that i don't know if there's apocryphal that you for breakfast every day you eat a cornflake marshmallow chocolate chip cookie i used to eat two every morning and the

bod 11 years later like it's very angry if i start with two warm cookies without like caffeine and something else that's like slightly more responsible though my diet today is proven otherwise All right, so the store was going to have cornflake marshmallow chocolate soup cookies. It was going to have crack pie, birthday cake. I mean, did you have staff at the beginning or was it just you? I think there were four of us at the beginning. And they remain four of the most incredible, loyal human beings. Lord knows why they followed me down into this crazy path.

But we would show up every day. We'd literally be like, you go home and sleep two hours. And then when you come back, I'm going to go home and take a shower. Yeah. And then you'll come back. Because it was a hamster. Like, the day you opened, there was a line around the block to get in it. What was that?

How do people know about it? We had the trust of people that knew what the Momo Fukune meant. And it was like, one, it was November 15th, 2008. Recession. People were scared. But you know how New York. workers are, like people still wanted to get out and be a part of a scene. And everyone loves a good line?

I don't know. It didn't make any sense to me. I was like, how do these people even know we're opening a bakery today? Do they even know what they're waiting in line for? And they came, and it was, like, I'm so grateful that I didn't have time to worry about. Are people going to get this? Are they going to get why we would put? pretzels and potato chips and ground coffee and all these other crazy salty sweet things into a

cookie and called a compost cookie are they going to be like girl what are you doing yeah and and and what it proved out was like there's like an incredible number of people that are like i think of them as like sweet toothed soulmates that like showed up and they showed up for like a milkshake on a Monday morning at 10 a.m and they showed up at 2 a.m because they were like i'm trying to while out but i got two dollars And so can I get a cookie? Can I get a cookie? I'm trying to figure out how did you like manage the business and also bake all this stuff? Because you, these were your recipes. They had to be to your standards.

Like you were in the kitchen. You were scooping out cookie dough. You were mixing stuff. But you were also like running a business that was increasing in popularity. Like did you never sleep? That's correct. That's correct. I still, to this day, am, like, always stressed out that I'm not going to get sleep at night.

But it never occurred to me. It was a one day at a time thing. It was the same thing of, like, cool, today I'm going to show up, and I'm going to roll that boulder up a freaking mountain, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to make it happen because it's what I believe in. It's because it's what these four people believe in. It's because people that are showing up at 9 a.m. and are like, I am here for that milkshake, that we're going to show up

and we're going to figure out how to make it happen. How was the business funded? I mean, I know, of course, David had, you know, came in and helped you open it up. You were putting in sweat equity all your time. I have to assume you were not independently wealthy at 27 years old. Yeah, definitely not.

So, like, was it, I mean, did he put in money and then you had to depend on cash flow? He loaned me money through our, through the hold co of Mom. Mofuku, and it was, I was very well versed at operating on a shoestring budget because that's how we built the Momofuku Empire. And so it was, it was a loan that we agreed that I'd pay back. And I just figured out how to make it work. I mean, I was raised in this mentality of like, you only need what you need, and most of the time you have everything that you need. And you can make so much more work

was so little. And it was always also really important to me that it was a patient pursuit and that it was a real business and that it was a business that was successful both emotionally and financially. But the profit margin on baked goods is really slim. And your cookies are not that expensive. I mean, at the time, I think they were $2, $2.25 when we first opened. So how are you able to have a sustainable business, even with all the hype and all the attention? I mean, that's a very narrow margin. It has always been important to me. Like, you can't hold space in people's lives.

You can't be a bakery for the people if people can't be a part of the bakery. And so it was always important to me. Our cookie over 11 years hasn't even gone up a whole dollar in price. We push back on that sort of stuff. Listen, you have to sell a lot of cookies to pay the rent. And so on some level, it's a volume business, but I've always thought about it in terms of like, well, the more cookies we make,

the more people we're feeding cookies. Like, that's what we're showing up for. That's what we're here for. I am not changing our fancy, very expensive butter that the team that does the financial analysis of food cost is like, like, please, please, a cheaper butter. and it's like, no, this is what it's built on. It's a reality, and it's something that we believe to be really important.

My access to food, my inspiration to food was from the grocery store, and I got excited about food because it was something that we could afford, and so it's always been important to me that that, I'm always building something that could inspire, like my 10-year-old self, and I can't price my 10-year-old self out of it. I mean, I'm curious, so, because obviously there was a lot of hype. I think 2009, Anderson Cooper on national television, Regis and Kelly said, hey, I have had this amazing crack pie in New York's incredible. Like, was that a turning point?

Did that result in just an explosion of interest? Yes. I didn't know he was going on TV, and I certainly, it's not like he was like, hey, girl, heads up. I got you tomorrow morning. I got you at 8.15 in the morning. But I had gotten home a few hours before. And at that time, my BlackBerry was the customer service. like dial up hotline.

And I just remember my Blackberry kept buzzing and buzzing and buzzing and buzzing. And I was like, what is going? Like, did the bakery catch fire? Is my family okay? What could this possibly be? And I had all these voicemails. And my favorite voicemail was from this woman in Kansas City who I think maybe was someone's grandma.

And she was just like, well, I heard Anderson Cooper talk about this crackpot. And I just, I'm never going to make it to New York. So like, would you mind shipping me one? And it was like, are you going to tell her? Are you going to call her back and tell her no? Because I was not going to call her back and tell her no. And I was like, I know how to ship pie. My whole upbringing was about taking half the baked goods we'd make

and putting them into care packages and sending them in the mail. There's nothing better than receiving baked goods in the mail. So I was like, I know how to do that. And I went to like all the local drugstores and bought those like break and freeze ice packs and then went to all of like the UPS and UPS stores. I was like, I'll take all the boxes, I'll take all the boxes, and just showed up at the bakery and was like, here we go. We got a new day.

It's a bigger boulder today than it was yesterday. And we now have an online business where you can email us. And, but like, opportunity knocks, what are you going to say? Like, not today. Yeah, right. Or, like, when it's time to rise to the occasion, you rise. What was, I mean, I can't imagine how insane it was, like baking, all keeping up with demand, running a business, like probably a lot of media requests were coming in.

What was keeping you up at night? Like, what was causing stress for you? Was any, were you stressed out? It's so interesting. I'm confident I was stressed out, but I wouldn't be like, I'm so stressed out. I'd just be like, okay, what's next? What am I thinking about? What's slowing us down?

there was a point where I was worried about, I'd be worried about like, do we have enough cookie scoops? And is the team feeling inspired to scoop as fast as I know we can scoop? Those are realities. And it became more operational than anything else. Financially, I was very, I was very, like, self-mandated on knowing what numbers we needed to hit, to be in a good place, to be in a medium place. And I knew every year, or every quarter, I would line up the like, what do we need to be able to do it better and more thoughtfully now that we know a little bit more? And what is our bottom line resource and how do we invest it back into the business? What was a relationship between you and David like?

I mean, he is a brilliant chef, obviously an incredible reputation, but also has a reputation of having clashed with lots of people. It's not, it's not, you know, abnormal for super talented people to clash with other people. It's not a ding on him, but, I mean, was he, like, coming in and trying to give you tips and advice? And I don't know, like, were you sort of pushing back and saying, get out of my way? Or did he just leave you alone? All of those things. All of those things, depending on the day. I think if you work in a kitchen, that, like, healthy tension, that, like, you're one moment you're on my team, the next moment you're in my way, the next minute we just don't see eye to eye about how we're going to get to the finish line or whatever it is.

Like at this point he remains forever brother and one of my most thoughtful sound boards for how I am thinking about building milk bar with the team. But I mean, we would, early days, we'd argue he'd be like, there can't be a line. No one wants to wait and let. Like we would argue about how quick or how slow the line would take and why. And at the same time, when you are as stubborn as I can be, you know. need someone that's also willing to dig into you because you can't see it. No one can see everything. And so our relationship has been hilarious and human throughout. I mean, we've known each other now

for almost 20 years. Yeah. But would I have like taken the step or the leap or I don't know. I mean, I have no clue. And I'm so grateful for having him in my life to kind of kick me out of the house. Did you, I mean, I think within about two years, you started to expand. You went to three stores. You had 60 employees. I'm just curious about the economics of this. I mean, were you even paying yourself in the first year or so? Very little.

Yeah. But, like, also, what am I? I'm here to live to build this bakery. I'm not like, I'm not taking a day off. What am I doing? Like, my going out is, like, going to a local bodega to get, like, a dirty sandwich late at night. That is joy. and splurge for me.

And it was whatever it took to make the business work. After the first, I was like, I'm going to write a cookbook because, one, I know that that part of the business will help. I can put that back into the business. And plus, it helps us reach more people and give recipes and this and the other. The reality of opening another store, because at the time I had this sweet little care package business,

thanks to Anderson Cooper and this one store. but that business was so big that we were doing crazy things like sticking shipping boxes basically all over our only store like there was a point where if you went in you could only take five steps forward and three steps to the left and then three backwards you know five backward steps out and i thought to myself like you got to build a bigger ship and so i knew i needed to think about a larger production kitchen i found an amazing space in williamsburg which is where we produce everything for our New York City stores. And I was like, great, this is like wonderful and takes so much weight off of that tension.

And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, that's just two rents to pay instead of one. And though the production part of it is easy, I'm now underutilizing this commissary space and I need to open another few stores to support it. I'm curious because there's a point, right, in every business, when an entrepreneur has to sort of decide, is this a lifestyle business? Yeah. and this could have been a great lifestyle business. You could have had three shops.

You could have baked on two or three days a week and done payroll and done accounting and run a business and made a good living and had a nice life. Or do you scale it up? Do you make it something much, much bigger? I mean, you must have had that internal dialogue, right? When did that happen? I think the first time that it started, that I started really taking that conversation seriously was two years ago when I decided to raise money to grow the business.

business for the first time to actually start taking this business, which was eight years in at the time seriously. And yeah, we could start charging $5 for a cookie. But that wasn't right to us. That's not who we are and that's not what we believe in. And I had a real reckoning with myself of this is a real business. And it's time to start thinking you're at that crossroads. And what is it and what do you want to do with it? You know, I was at the San Francisco airport recently, and it was just like a deli or bar there, and they had cookies with potato chips and marshmallows and things that were so unusual when you introduced them in 2008, right? Crack pie, cereal milk-flavored things.

All of those things are out there. I think Ben and Jerry's at one point had a cereal milk. I don't know if they still have the cereal milk ice cream. Do they still have it? They don't. Okay. I got you. Sore point.

Sorry. Sorry about that. How do you feel about when you see like the mainstreaming of potato chips and sweet corn and cereal milk flavors and desserts all over the place? It's kind of supernatural. It's like both endearing and wonderful because I think it points to people's in. enthusiasm to like ignite their curiosity and to like get a little wacky and wild and to think about breaking the rules in these tiny little ways. And then on another level like it turbocharges us. It makes us say like we're coming to the aisles of the grocery store. Like that's our space. One, that's where my imagination started. It's where I still go. And that's, that's where we're going. That's what we're doing. And you have stuff in.

And we're coming out, like, we're coming in strong and the future guy. Like, we're here. You just wait. It's both wanting to celebrate people's, like, curiosity and food, and then to also be like, we've got to keep going. We're going to keep going, and we're going to keep pushing. But you bootstrapped this thing for, like, eight years, and you were growing and growing and growing.

So did you feel like you had to take outside money to really scale the business? business that you couldn't do it without outside money? No, it wasn't that at all. I mean, I had proven for eight years that I didn't need the money, but I also knew that at this inflection point, it would almost be stubborn to not consider it, to not take myself seriously, to not take this thing that we had built that is like based on humanity and patience and real things and things that we do with our hands and not with our thumbs and to not put more of that in the world. I have been super thoughtful around how to raise money to fuel the business while also making sure that the values and the principles of what we stand for exist and that loss of

control isn't possible. I think you guys have 16 shops now, right? You've got the, the mail order business accounts for like a third of your business, something like that. Yeah. Almost 400 employees? Yeah. 440 today. I took the count for you. Just in case you asked.

I think I know the answer to this question because you have, I mean, very obviously a really strong work ethic. I mean, does any part of you ever just want to, I don't know, just kind of sell it and, I mean, get up the hamster wheel and just kind of enjoy the fruits of your hard work over the last decade? I don't see it as a hamster wheel. Like, I'm so fueled by it still where I'm like, I could go into like my Gmail and click on my drafts and my list of ideas that have to go on the menu, whether it's in grocery stores, whatever it is, is so long. I just, until that list gets shorter, and I can't see it getting shorter anytime soon. I, like, what am I going to do in it?

What would I do in a day? I probably just wake up and start baking. So why would I, like, why, you know, why would I give that away? I got a lot of ovens to do the baking in these days. I know that you didn't get into, you didn't open milk bar with David for, to make a lot of money. It was a cool opportunity. It was a cool thing to do. You didn't sort of look out in the distance and say, I'm going to be really rich.

But you've made money. How does that change your life? Not much. would say like the thing that has changed about my life is I'm not like sleeping and eating and baking in the same cubby which is nice um I mean but then also you miss the romance of it because it was so lovely when that was it um I spend I would say for me my biggest how it's changed my life is I put so much of myself into this profession. Before a milk bar even, coming to New York City, I said goodbye to my family and knew that they wouldn't understand immediately. And now, and I put everything

into it. I never took a day off. And now I can arguably take a day off and get on a plane or a train or in a car or on a us and go and see my people and go and live life in the ways that we like create those sticky moments at milk bar for you and that for me is like the greatest indulgence like nothing else changes like I'm still trying to go through a store shopping I'm still trying to make friendship bracelet like it's cool because I can take like an embroidery craft class and not be like oh my gosh am I going to eat am I going to be eating like craft mac and cheese for the next six days to support it and that part of it's easy and the rest of it I just don't really care about. You've heard me ask this question before and I'm going to ask you the same question. How much of all this that's happened to you

is because of your intelligence and credible hard work and how much do you think it's just because you got lucky? I think it was more opportunity than it was luck. I think it was I'm never like the one that I don't win scratch off lotto tickets. That is a splurge. That's when I left out. I don't consider myself to really have great I'm never the one that like wins the contest, but, um, I show up and I mean it. And I'm just a really big believer in good people that show up and mean it winning in the end. And I think that's a mixture of, um, like focus and smarts and hard work. And P.S. Like, I had no street smarts when I moved to New York City. All of these skills you can sharpen, as long as you remove the barriers to convincing

yourself, you can sharpen your skills. Um, and it's opportunity. And like an opportunity knocks when that blackberry starts buzzing, you better get your hindie out of bed and get to it. Christina Tozzi, founder of milk bar. Christina. I spoke with Christina Tozzi at the town hall in New York City. By the way, the tallest milk bar cake ever made was a seven-layer wedding cake, mint cookies, and cream. And the occasion, Christina's own wedding in 2016. And as is often the case with wedding cake, the guest didn't finish all of it that night.

So the next morning, they just had it for breakfast. Hey, thanks so much for listening to this live episode of How I Built This. Our show was produced this week by Rachel Faulkner and Candice Lim, with music composed by Rumtin Arablewe. Our live events team includes Jessica Goldstein, Ali Prescott, Alan Jorgensen, and Andy Huther. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Sanaz-Meshkampur, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Sequoia Carrillo.

I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. You know,