The Next Hype Pastry Is At A Little-known Park Slope Bakery

The egg cup at Breadivore. | Breadivore

Breadivore fuses Chinese and French flavors and techniques

Across New York City’s Chinatowns, egg tarts are a bakery staple, known for their smooth, custardy interiors. Now, a bakery in Brooklyn’s South Slope is riffing on the traditional pastry, evolving it into something else entirely. At Breadivore, baskets of thinly layered croissant dough are filled with egg, ricotta, Parmesan, and garlic chive — one of the menu’s many playful unions of Chinese and European baking traditions.

“Four basic ingredients, it’s really that simple,” says owner Cixiu Gao. She quietly opened her brick-and-mortar at 500A Fifth Avenue, at 12th Street, in Brooklyn last summer, following pop-up success at various farmer’s markets around the borough.

Inside, Breadivore opts for warmth over the high-design of many bakeries: There are no marble countertops or hanging copper lamps. Instead, it feels like an extension of Gao’s home kitchen with colorful tiling and the walls painted shades of earthy orange. Potted succulents and flowers line the window, lutes play in the background, and a long wooden table invites customers to stay a while.

Scroll Breadivore’s Yelp pages (or ask a customer) and you’ll encounter a light-hearted tension between those bemused by Breadivore’s low-profile and those hoping it remains a local secret.

The egg tart, or egg cup as it’s listed on the menu ($7.50), is one reason. Gao thought to capitalize on the enduring popularity of croissants — which continue to see success, even recently at another Park Slope newcomer called Miolin Bakery. Crispy ridgelines of pastry hold the deep comforts of ricotta and a perfect gratin top, with garlic chive that adds a slight kick. The result looks like a quiche or a frittata.

In an era in which eggs have become increasingly expensive, it’s a signature pastry that carries some weight. But Gao goes the extra mile across her pastry case, even using freshly milled flour from upstate New York: “I don’t want to serve people fake things,” Gao says. “They don’t taste good.”

It’s a principle drawn from Gao’s years in the kitchen of Per Se and the now-shuttered Bouchon Bakery, where she gleaned “some really serious classic baking” before the pandemic. As the name suggests (chosen because: “I eat bread, you eat bread, everybody eats bread,”) bread is a central character at Breadivore. Sourdough to be specific: made via a slow 24-hour fermentation process, sold in four varieties: plain, seeds, gruyere, figs and walnut ($8 - $11).

Breadivore A line-up of pastries and bread.

For Gao, a love for bread hasn’t always been there. In her telling, she first began baking less than a decade ago after moving to the U.S. for graduate studies. “In China, we don’t really eat bread, we don’t really bake, nobody has an oven at home and so the whole thing was completely new,” she says.

She quickly got a handle on yeast metabolism, fermentation, and their effects on flavor — something she credits to her background in biology. After hitting an impasse in academia and having grown tired of lecturing, Gao enrolled at the International Culinary Center, graduating in 2017, before moving on to work at Manhattan restaurants.

Still, once pandemic closures forced Gao to bake independently, she hoped to introduce flavors she’d grown up with into French bread craft.

Gao adapted her mother’s recipe for yuanxiao — glutinous rice balls stuffed with black sesame — that she grew up eating in Beijing to mark the end of the Lunar New Year. At Breadivore, she has transformed them into a black sesame twist. Sweet osmanthus, a fragrant flower found across East Asia, is often used to flavor the thin soup in which the yuanxiao float. Inside this Breadivore pastry, it is used two ways: mixed into the filling in syrup form, and as a gel, piped in after baking. The result is a swirl of orange and black, one Gao calls “the cinnamon roll’s cousin.”

Breadivore A black sesame osmanthus pastry.

A memory of the purple radish and white pepper puff pastries Gao enjoyed while living in Shanghai also served as a reference. Keen to liberate the radish from being mere salad food in western cuisine, it’s grated, cooked, and seasoned before being worked into a scone alongside Parmesan. It was a best-seller during Breadivore’s pop-up era and one Gao says people have been asking her to bring back for the bakery.

In leaning into northern Chinese flavors (Gao’s mother is ethnically Manchu), Breadivore is distinct from the mild and sweet offerings at the city’s many Cantonese bakeries. It joins the likes of Là Lá Bakeshop, Bánh by Lauren, and Lady Wong in offering baked goods that use regionally distinct ingredients and speak to the owners’ heritage mixed with their culinary training.

Gao’s experiences prepared her for the bread and the butter, less so the other aspects of running a business. Staffing has been tricky. Marketing doesn’t come naturally. Ditto social media, though her baked goods are photogenic in the way that has drawn lines at other new bakeries. She’s reluctant to expand her product offerings too far — though, at the insistence of loyal customers, she’s conceded to an espresso machine, which arrived on the day of our meeting, lurking in its giant box. And yeah, all the while, those egg prices keep climbing.

But Gao stays experimenting. Currently, she’s mulling over a pig in a blanket that swaps out sausage and cheese for a variation on her family’s recipe for pork and chive dumplings.

“I wanted to create something cheerful and relaxing,” Gao says. “No one really needs sugar or baked goods unless they make you feel better or are a placebo that makes you less stressed out.” Breadivore’s goodies may do just that.