Toast all the Rage

Ira Glass

It’s This American Life. I’m Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today’s program, “There’s No Place Like Home,” stories of people doing unusual things to create or preserve or hold onto a home for themselves. We’ve arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, The Hostess with the Toast-ess.

John Gravois moved with his wife and daughters a year and a half ago across the country to San Francisco. And he has been very aware of the ways that San Francisco seems different from the rest of the country. Recently, he noticed something new happening around the Bay Area, which turned out to be not what he thought at all. Here’s John.

John Gravois

A few months ago, I was standing in line at a coffee shop on my way to work. And I couldn’t stop staring at this guy behind the counter. He was cutting inch-thick slices of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them.

But it was the way he did it that caught my attention. He had the solemn intensity of a ping-pong player who keeps his game very close to the table, knees slightly bent, wrist flicking the butter knife back and forth, his eyes suggesting a kind of flow state. In front of him, laid out in a neat row, were a few long Pullman loaves, that boxy Wonder Bread shape, but recognizably handmade and freshly baked.

On the menu, toast stood all on its own as an option at $3 per slice. So I ordered some. It was good. It tasted like toast, only better.

A couple of weeks later, I stumbled across another place with a self-described toast bar. Then another. This third place I went to was like a temple to hot, sliced bread. It was called The Mill, a big, light-filled cafe and bakery with exposed rafters and polished concrete floors, like a rustic Apple store, with a small chalkboard listing the day’s toast menu.

I asked the manager at one of these places what was going on. Why all the toast? Tip of the hipster spear, he said. And then I realized what this meant. Toast, like the cupcake and the dill pickle before it, had been elevated to the artisanal plane.

I had two reactions to this. First, of course, I rolled my eyes. How silly. How precious. How perfectly San Francisco. Artisanal toast. And second, despite myself, I felt a little thrill of discovery. As a 35-year-old guy with a wife and two kids, I’m usually the last to find out about a trend.

But here I was, apparently standing up on the artisanal toast wave, way before it crashed into Brooklyn, Chicago, and Los Angeles, before the inevitable article in Slatetelling people that they’re making toast all wrong, before the even more inevitable backlash by angry bloggers.

I decided to go looking for the origins of the fancy toast trend. How does such a thing get started? What determines how far it goes? Maybe I thought it would help me understand the rise of all of the seemingly trivial things that start in San Francisco and then go supernova across the country. And just as I began searching, the backlash arrived.

The local media started running articles with headlines like “$4 Toast– Why the Tech Industry is Ruining San Francisco.” And almost all of the blaming fingers pointed at The Mill. So I figured, bingo. That’s Ground Zero.

But one of the owners there, Josey Baker– yes, he’s a baker, and yes, that’s his name– told me he was not the originator of this craze.

John Gravois

No, Josey wasn’t the Chuck Berry of fancy toast. He was more like the Elvis of fancy toast, a guy who caught the trend when it was already on an upswing. The place he first saw it, four or five years ago, is out in one of San Francisco’s windiest, foggiest, farthest-flung areas, the Outer Sunset. Other toast professionals sent me to the same cafe.

It’s completely different from any of the other places serving toast. For one thing, it’s about 10 times smaller. In fact, it’s nothing like what I expected. And the story behind it– the story of the person who started this trend– made the trend itself feel like an embarrassingly tiny thing to focus on.

So I’m going to tell you that story. But first I should tell you the name of the place. It’s called The Trouble Coffee and Coconut Club, otherwise known simply as Trouble.

Trouble’s really popular. It always seems to have a line going out the door. And because the shop is the size of a single car garage, it’s cramped and crowded with artifacts and wall hangings, like a very personal museum.

John Gravois

On the menu are four main items. Coffee, cinnamon toast, coconuts, and shots of grapefruit juice named after Yoko Ono.

John Gravois

The founder of Trouble is Giulietta Carrelli. And every one of those menu items has a defined significance to her, as does her never changing wardrobe. She’s always in a sleeveless crop top, ripped jeans, and a head scarf. She’s covered in tattoos, including her cheeks, which are tattooed with freckles and always flushed, like a biker Pippi Longstocking.

John Gravois

And yes, she confirms it. She says it took a long time for the rest of San Francisco to copy her toast idea. Trouble is the kind of place where you might walk in and feel excluded, like I guess I’m not hipster enough for all this. That’s kind of the way I felt at first.

But then Giulietta told me something that made Trouble and the purpose of it snap into focus. Trouble isn’t just the name of Giulietta’s coffee shop. Trouble is her word for a psychotic episode, the kind she’s had since she was 16, growing up in Cleveland. Her official diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder, but she only learned that recently. And back when the episodes first started, in high school, she had no idea what was wrong with her.

John Gravois

During an episode, sometimes she hears voices or gets the sense that she doesn’t actually exist. Also, eating is difficult. She can’t stand the sound of her own chewing. After ruling out her LSD theory, she thought maybe she was just having lots of nervous breakdowns. Then came the theory that she was bipolar. She was even medicated for bipolar disorder.

John Gravois

She somehow managed to put herself through college, three different colleges, in different corners of the country, by booking shows for underground bands and working at record stores and coffee shops. But Giulietta’s illness was a kind of time bomb that eventually leveled any structure in her life. Roommates kicked her out. Romances fell apart. Her bosses either fired her or quietly stopped scheduling her for shifts.

A lot of the time, she was pretty much homeless. She slept in her car, on lots of couches. For a little while, she slept in a tree. By the time she hit 30, she had lived in nine different cities.

She first came here, to the Bay Area, as a student at Berkeley. And she remembers this one episode, a long, delusional walk through San Francisco, during which she called the police to let them know a tree had fallen on top of her, which it hadn’t. And finally Giulietta found herself at China Beach, in the northwest part of town. On the sun deck was an elderly man sitting on a towel, wearing a Speedo, sunbathing on a cloudy day that suggested anything but. This would be the beginning of the beginning for Giulietta and for Trouble Coffee– the moment she met Glen.

John Gravois

Glen, whose real name is Gunther Neustadt, was a Holocaust survivor who escaped Germany as a boy. Anybody who went to China Beach regularly back then will tell you he was a fixture there. But more than Glen that first day, Giulietta was struck by a pair of Russian men, climbing out of the ocean after a swim. I should mention here that almost year round, the water at China Beach is cold enough to make you hypothermic after a few minutes.

John Gravois

First to South Carolina, then Georgia, where she hit upon the first in a series of coping mechanisms that she still uses– coconuts. For some reason, coconuts are the one food that doesn’t feel like poison when Giulietta is in an episode. And the chewing sound isn’t as bad. And not to sound like an infomercial for coconuts, they’re really nutritious. Giulietta says you can survive on them, provided you have a source of Vitamin C, hence the grapefruit juice on Trouble’s menu.

Another great thing about coconuts, people talk to you when you’re holding one. Giulietta has studies to prove it, studies she performed herself, standing on a sidewalk, noting down how many strangers engage with her when she’s holding a sandwich versus when she was holding a coconut. It wasn’t even close.

John Gravois

Still, she was barely sleeping and self-medicating a lot with pills, mostly Vicodin and whiskey. She was away from San Francisco for four or five years.

John Gravois

Giulietta took me to China Beach, to the spot on the sun deck where she started hanging out with Glen after she came back. Talking with him every day, the routine of it, was the next thing she found that really helped her. At the end of every visit, he’d say the same thing. See you tomorrow.

Soon she started joining the other swimmers at China Beach. She swims every day now at about the same time. When she’s having an episode, the cold water can shock her out of hallucinating.

John Gravois

Giulietta got the idea for Trouble in 2005. But it wasn’t so much an idea as a whirlwind of coconuts and strangers meeting each other and cinnamon toast, all swirling around in her mind. She was working in a coffee shop at the time, always button-holing customers and coworkers about her plans.

She did the same with Glen, who brought the idea down to earth, telling her point blank to open a checking account, go to City Hall, and ask them about starting a small business. And her boss at the coffee shop found her sleeping there once or twice, and rather than say you’re fired, he said, I think it’s time for you to open your own place.

John Gravois

With barely any money, she landed a five-year lease in the Outer Sunset, in a former doggy day spa that seemed to have been a front for some kind of crystal meth operation. So here was a shop that sells coconuts and toast in a crummy part of town that nobody went to, run by a person with a significant mental illness.

John Gravois

She put coconuts on the menu because of the times she’d relied on them for easy sustenance. And because they did help her strike up conversations.

John Gravois

In 2012, so just two years ago, Giulietta finally got the definitive diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and medication that genuinely helps keep the episodes at bay. She stopped drinking and taking drugs a long time ago. But the major way she’s managed to cope with her episodes when they happen is by creating a network of people and turning herself into a local institution, which is what she’s been doing, bit by bit, ever since she came back to San Francisco from New York. At first, it was just the people she saw in her daily bike route to and from China Beach.

John Gravois

This is why she wears the same outfit every day– the crop tops and the head scarves. It’s why she’s covered herself with tattoos– so people will recognize her. And it’s why she takes the same routes, day in and day out, around San Francisco– so she can be recognized. When people interact with her, say hello on the street or call her name, it can do the same thing that cold water does when she swims– knock her back into herself. It can mean the difference between her getting home or wandering lost around the city. And it’s one of the reasons why she created Trouble.

John Gravois

Fancy toast isn’t what Trouble’s about. It’s just the weird chunk of the spaceship that broke off and landed in the rest of the world’s front lawn. But in a way, it makes perfect sense that the trend started with Giulietta. Most of us dedicate the bulk of our attention to a handful of relationships– with a significant other, children, parents, a few close friends. Social scientists call these strong ties.

But for Giulietta, those kinds of strong ties have a way of buckling under the weight of her illness. So she’s adapted by forming as many relationships, as many weak ties, as she possibly can. And webs of weak ties are how ideas spread, ideas like, in this case, toast.

Ira Glass

John Gravois. He wrote a version of this story, a great version, for PacificStandard Magazine, where he’s an editor. By the way, you can’t really live on coconuts and grapefruit juice. Not for long. Don’t try it.