Cupcake Cafe
I'm speaking with Ann Warren, an owner of Cupcake Cafe in Hell's Kitchen, a favorite destination of New Yorkers for butter-cream-swathed cakes and cupcakes, standout donuts and rustic pies. We're sitting at one of the cafe's few small tables as Warren finishes a lunch of black bean soup and discusses the bakery.
"I think people are sometimes confused," says Warren, who speaks in abrupt patterns, and often separates sentences with eruptions of nervous laughter. "They expect us to be Amy's, a homespun cute kind of place."
The cafe, which the Times credits with grandfathering the cupcake craze, started off 16 years ago not as a cupcake place at all. Rather, it was an attempt by Ann and her partner, baker Michael Warren, to fill a niche for wholesale homemade donuts. They were considering a Long Island City location, but Ann noticed a for-rent sign at their current storefront, once an Italian bakery. The Hell's Kitchen location, they decided, would make it easier to care for their 18-month-old daughter, whom they were raising in the neighborhood.
"When we came up with this name, cupcakes were the last thing on our minds, but Cupcake Cafe just stuck," says Ann. "We were planning on selling coffee and donuts."
That may have been the case, but soon after it opened, the cafe's special-occasion cakes quickly became their number-one seller. The painterly decorations on both the full-sized and cupcakes quickly became their signature. Warren, a trained painter and self-taught pastry chef, created what should be an oxymoron: tasteful butter-cream flowers. From the most vivid tones to the subtlest, dainty and wild-autumn gold mums streaked with red and orange, wisteria piped in lilacs and periwinkles-the decorations never cease to impress.
All this time, the Cupcake Cafe has been an unassuming place, located in a barren part of town and frequented primarily by people in the know.
"I'd like to think, and I hate to use this expression," says Warren, "that we're a destination. I mean, who just hangs around at 39th and 9th?"
What many regulars do not know is that the Cupcake is slated to become the cafe at the new site of Books of Wonder, one of Manhattan's top children's bookstores, which opened last week at 18 W. 18th St. It's not entirely inappropriate that Cupcake Cafe should wind up in a children's bookstore-Warren's mother was a children's librarian and her grandmother wrote a children's book.
While a new location does not mandate that the Hell's Kitchen cafe must close, it just so happened that prior to Books of Wonder's proposal, the Cupcake Cafe's landlord unexpectedly sold the building, and the new owner did not renew their August 2005 lease.
"We were waiting for an assessment," says Ann, who along with Michael had hoped to purchase the building first. "Then someone came from out of nowhere and slapped down $1.5 million cash for it, and that was it."
Judging by the clusters of customers sitting around, comfortably chatting, eating soups and munching on mammoth wedges of apple coffeecake, it appears that nobody knows the news. Or they are choosing to ignore it for the time being. Unlike the prominent notices of the Cupcake Cafe's arrival downtown that have been plastered on Books of Wonder's windows for months, there is no indicator here that the hangout is on its way out. The only signs posted are lists of pie flavors written on doilies and hand-painted signs that Warren made for the donuts.
"I have no idea how they're going to feel about it," she says of her regulars. "Some people are pleased for us because they think it's going to be a good move. Obviously they don't want us to go out of business."
Even when it opens downtown (the owners still aren't sure when), the original Cupcake Cafe will remain operational until the lease is up.
Envisioning the Cupcake Cafe at a swishy location like 18th between 5th and 6th Aves. is difficult. Part of the Cupcake's allure is its diamond-in-the-rough quality. Located in a grungy space and even grungier neighborhood-the one-room bakery features unvarnished wooden plank floors, chipping pink walls and slightly foggy glass displays-part of the thrill is in the discovery, and part is in the contrast of the treasures inside to the vessel that holds them. The jewel-like cakes and cupcakes are the Land of Oz's saturated Technicolor to the Auntie Em dullness of the bakery itself.
Just how much this juxtaposition is responsible for the cafe's allure remains to be seen. The new space at Books of Wonder will have none of it. The refurbished space features spanking new refrigerated cases, soaring, loft-like ceilings and shiny, white-tiled walls, much more like its new neighbor City Bakery than its former self.
Ann will miss the old cafe, but hopes one day to reopen the bakery in its original location.
"I love this neighborhood. It's a non-neighborhood neighborhood, but we're really the only ones here." Still, Warren welcomes the change. "I enjoy going to different neighborhoods. I like going down to Ladies Mile; I have my hair done on the Upper West Side; I like going to Japanese restaurants in the East Village. Basically, I'm a New Yorker. I'll be happy anywhere."