#corner bakery

This is, pun intentional, so delicious.

For those of you who may be new, my feud with Corner Bakery goes back at least a decade at this point because they kept selling me food that made me sick. But the reason this is delicious is not that I am witnessing the fall of a worthy foe -- it's because I think this confirms my theories about its business model, since Corner Bakery explicitly failed because a) trends were shifting before the pandemic and b) Corner Bakery lost revenue that other places didn't due to people working from home.

My theory has always been that Corner Bakery's model was to situate itself in places where there were no other strong options. Corner Bakeries tend to exist in business districts or tourist districts where people are just far enough away from other good food options to make a reasonably priced soups-and-sandwiches place look appealing. They went into museums, or near museums and other tourist destinations, where the other options were either very high-end or McDonalds. Their locations in Chicago's downtown are near skyscrapers full of people who want fresh, "healthy" food quickly on their lunch break but don't want a grocery-store sandwich.

And then they serve the absolute cheapest, poorest-prepared food possible. Tiny expensive bags of cheap chips, the lowest-quality deli meats and condiments, gross bread used even after it goes stale, elderly veggies used after they start wilting. The last time I got a sandwich there, it was made with the heels of the bread, unripe avocado, and deli turkey that was uncomfortably wet. The last time I ate there ever, I got food poisoning from a slice of lemon pound cake.

I didn't know that this was true but I suspected it, and the coverage seems to be confirming that their brand of swindle, which was highly vulnerable to a drop in tourism, turns out to have been even more vulnerable to mass work-from-home than most restaurant chains.

📰 "Corner Bakery" 🗞

Peinture réaliste 🎨 Karin Jurick

Unrelated to anything but to the number of people who asked me why I warned Anon off eating at Corner Bakery in Chicago -- I used to eat there occasionally in my first few years in the city, until I instituted a ban because their food was so uniformly awful, so frequently poorly made, bad tasting, and threatening to the digestion, that I realized the problem was institutional. It happened to me across at least four different Corner Bakeries between Roosevelt and Sheridan, including the one in the Field Museum (now mercifully a cafeteria) and the one in the Crain’s building, which ought to know better. 

The second to last time I ever ate at Corner Bakery I got a turkey and cheese sandwich with avocado to go. The avocado was so unripe it was crunchy, the turkey was unsettlingly wet, the cheese was absent, and perhaps to maintain structural integrity due to the Wet Turkey they made the sandwich with the HEELS OF THE BREAD LOAF. I understand sometimes you run out of bread, but I do feel like getting a $9 sandwich made with the two last slices of bread that are 99% crust entitles you to some kind of discount, especially since by the time you get to the heels both are stale. 

The last time I ever ate at Corner Bakery I got a slice of lemon poppyseed cake, thinking this would be safe, and spent that evening vomiting.