Getting these muffins couldn’t have been easier.
An East Village cafe owner and local foodies are so enamoured with the taste of a chocolate muffin that’s making waves at the 2024 Paris Olympics that they’re competing for a gold medal to bring the muffin from France to New York.
Isshiki Matcha owner Angel Jenn teamed up with Kerrin-Carolyn Chan, a sweet-toothed stranger she met on TikTok, to track down a mouth-watering double chocolate chip muffin at a little-known bakery in central France.
Then they flew in dozens of muffins for a one-day pop-up sale at the restaurant last Saturday, where locals lined up for two blocks starting at 6 a.m. and paid $10 a muffin.
“I just wanted to know if it was possible, so I just carried on,” Zhang said. Gothamist“I thought, ‘OK, this is a lot more achievable than going to the Olympics.'”
The snack became a social media hit earlier this month after Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen posted 10 videos in which he raved about the snack, calling it the best he had ever eaten at the Olympic Village cafeteria.
Other athletes, including gold medalist fencer Lee Kiefer, called the baked good, which has big chunks of chocolate and a gooey, molten chocolate center, the best thing since sliced bread.
The muffins that caused a stir online article The cafe was featured on food site Eater, catching the attention of Chang, a Brooklyn-based designer who had no previous affiliation with the cafe.
Chan told Gothamist that after seeing the video on TikTok, she became obsessed with finding and eating the muffins.
Using her online sleuthing skills, she found French food supplier Coup De Pates, whose website featured a photo of what she thought was the famous muffin, which Eater later confirmed was the treat in question.
But the Ferrières-en-Brie bakery operates on a business-to-business distribution model and was not set up to export food to New York.
So Chang took to TikTok to ask if he could partner with a New York restaurant to expand into the Big Apple.
“I was looking at it from a very capitalistic perspective, but really, I just wanted to try the muffins myself,” she said.[I wrote] “Hey, is there anybody out there who wants to collaborate on this at restaurants or cafes or whatever? I think there’s a great opportunity here.”
The owner of the cafe saw the post and the two women decided to work together.
“I just thought casually, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it. This looks like a fun project,'” Cheng said. “I would love to try these Olympic muffins myself.”
They then relentlessly lobbied Cou de Pate via email, phone and social media to ask them to send their famous muffins to Isshiki Matcha on Second Avenue.
The company ultimately agreed to ship 300 of the baked goods, but the women still needed to go through FDA approval procedures and arrange for a van to transport the muffins from Newark Airport.
The women also worked with customs agents, who retrieved the muffins, which had been packed in dry ice.
“They had never done business in New York, and as soon as the muffins were loaded onto a plane bound for the French airport, we were left alone,” Cheng said.
They said the muffins tasted just as good as they were advertised.
“It’s very light. It’s not like a brownie. It’s not too sweet,” Zhang says. “It has a light batter, but it’s surprisingly rich in flavor and very moist.”
At an event dubbed “Muffin Mania” held at the cafe on Saturday, the muffins sold out within two hours.
“The line was two blocks long,” Nicole Chan, 21, a barista at Isshiki Matcha, told The Washington Post.
“I had just a small bite of the muffin, and it lived up to my expectations,” she says. “I can see why Olympians are so crazy about them.”
Zhang and Zheng are now working to ship at least 1,000 more muffins.
