“I told myself I wasn’t going to do croissants—I’d just sell cookies. Well, I sold like three cookies. So I did croissants. People freaked out. My business tripled. They weren’t even that good. Dammit.”
Truth is escaping Crystal White. Her croissants are very, very good. So is just about everything else she and her crew make at Wayfarer Bread & Pastry.
Get the kouign-amann, essentially a mutant near-croissant on a sugar high, with a shellacked caramelized crust. Or hit pizza night—some of the best dough in the city topped with whatever peak-season veggies in the farm box taste peakiest.
White’s blue-collar family moved to Napa when she was a kid (before it was “Napa”). She fell hard for baking because it seemed like witchcraft (a pile of flour becomes WHAT?!). She proposed culinary school. Her parents proposed “no.”
“They told me if I went to business school I could get a certificate in culinary.”
So she did, graduating in three years while working in the college bakery. “I’d get up at 3AM, wave to my friends coming home from the frat parties,” she says. “Then I’d go into this underground dungeon and bake thousands and thousands of things for all the students.”
She and a friend (acclaimed baker Na Young Ma) decided they wanted to open a bakery making the best croissants. Problem? They had no clue how. So they read books, tinkered obsessively, and opened Proof. It was a huge success (still is). White left to train at San Fancisco’s Tartine, then came to San Diego because “I always dreamed of owning a little bakery by the beach.”
While she was painting her little dream in 2018 (she was living in a room behind the kitchen), a neighbor popped by to politely suggest she would fail. The line that formed almost immediately—and is still going—says other things.
And they serve croissants, dammit.
