Dining Out 003: Toad Bakery
Breakfast in Peckham.
It is Saturday and you wake up early. You have got somewhere to be.
Maybe you leave your partner sleeping, pull on a pair of soft tracksuit bottoms, and take their dog – who you only half like because it is skinny and shakes if there is shouting on the television – on the ten minute walk down the road.
Maybe you are in a good mood because you have plans to meet friends there. Maybe you pop on a boxy, padded jacket, tied with a ribbon at your chest, or a GANNI sweater vest, or a scrunchie bigger than your head, or a pair of Le Specs, or a Stüssy bomber jacket, or Santal 33, or a Daunt Books bag, or a Trader Joe’s bag, or a Uniqlo cross body bag, or TNs, or Onitsuka Tigers (NOT Sambas anymore though) to go down at your groupchat’s chosen time. Maybe you dislike London meme account stereotypes and you just want a decent croissant; maybe you’re just at a loose end and you feel like it. Maybe, if you are really hateful, you go for a run before you arrive.
Regardless of which playable character you might be today, however, your destination is the same: a bonafide hotspot where you will see, be seen, and eat well. You are headed to the bakery queue.
Bakery queues are a full on London phenomenon. They have popped up all over the city post-pandemic, often represent about a 40 minute wait at the weekend, and are crawling with punters ready to drop serious cash on coffees and highly decorative pastries.
This is usually because these hungry customers have spotted the bakeries that correspond to the queues on social media, and want to both eat and photograph their wares for themselves. As such, lots of the punters tend to also occupy the type of trendy, very online demographic who might also spend their money on the clothes, accessories and lifestyle markers I mentioned above (and I know my flippant referencing of brands feels a bit like a bite of very low-hanging fruit from the Real Housewives of Clapton tree, but the fact is that while it is of course not the whole story, you will definitely see all of this stuff in these particular queues). I am a pastry demon so I get in these queues often myself, and knowing it’s going to take ages to get to the front, I (not to brag) bring a book, or arrange to meet friends for a two-birds-one-stone catch up.
These lines snake around corners and down streets, hitting their peak on Saturdays. In Crystal Palace, there’s the queue for Chatsworth Bakehouse, who post their fun menu of focaccia and honey pies and Basque cheesecakes online the night before. Near London Fields there’s Forno, who started an unlikely bloodlust for dairy cream-laden maritozzi among fashion people who don’t normally eat*. In Hornsey and Newington Green and Angel and Shoreditch there are branches of Jolene, whose bakers seem to have a sixth sense for cake designs so ornamental you’d happily display them in your home. And on the bit of road between Camberwell and Peckham, there is a small shop front opposite a Sainsbury’s Local, dishing out retro iced fingers, doorstop sandwich rolls, and giant Jaffa Cakes, by the name of Toad Bakery.
My first experience of Toad was back in 2021, when they were Frog, trading out of Platform, a community café space in Loughborough Junction, near Brixton and Camberwell. I lived close by so I’d pop in for pastry twists (see below for a particularly memorable one – it was really sticky and flavoured with cardamom), and knishes speared through with toothpicks, holding obscene-looking dill pickles.
I’ve always been massively charmed by their understanding that for novelty to work – for it to really thrill – it has to be underpinned by serious rigour. Now, at the Peckham bakery, French classics, like croissant and pain au chocolat, are always available, but the more definitive, own-brand Toad bakes definitely feel more essentially English. I don’t mean that in a frilly afternoon tea way, but in a sense that feels like it’s just as inspired by getting a Greggs as a treat after school as it is by the principles of viennoiserie.
I think that’s why Toad has become so beloved and so hypey so quickly. They have this knack for creating items that are fun – almost silly – and very often nostalgic, like Devon splits, and lemon and poppyseed iced buns, and even a signature sourdough, which, ingeniously, is modelled on a tin loaf (and as a result, is fluffier and chewier than a flatter sourdough; have a slice with a can of crap Cream of Tomato soup and thank me later). There is a real sense at Toad of food’s emotional capabilities, as well as a command of flavour interesting enough to put twists on known quantities, considered technique, aesthetic flair, and, importantly, a sense of humour. All of these things together create the conditions necessary for viral baked goods every time.
It figures, then, that people travel from all over London to visit Toad, though I’m fortunate enough to be quite local so I go all the time. I don’t often brave the weekend queue, however, but in the spirit of research, I roped my friend Hannah into doing the long wait with me last Saturday.
We took our place a fair way down Peckham Road outside the shop, at about 9:45AM. The crowd was as usual, and Hannah also commented on the London clichés present (the joke being, of course, that we were also very much there). There were lots of ruddy runners, gagging for an almond croissant following what I can only assume to have been a “fat Strava sesh”, girlies in ponytails and oval-shaped sunglasses in orange and olive green, a couple with a miniature Schnauzer that definitely cost more than a month of rent on my flat, and locals of all ages (indeed, it would be disingenuous to say that Instagram-conscious millennials and Gen Zs are the only people who go to these places – bakeries always have been important parts of their local communities, providing fresh goods at a more affordable price point than restaurants, and you see that reflected in the queues, too).
When we eventually got to the front, Hannah and I freestyled the order, stupidly having made no decisions in the 40 minutes prior. We went for a few savouries – a cheese straw and arguably Toad’s signature item, the everything bagel croissant – a regular croissant, a custard and blackberry Danish and then, because I am a sick woman, the two cookies on the counter. One was soy, sesame and chocolate, and the other white chocolate and pretzel.
Unless you have the divine on your side, it’s reasonably unlikely that you’ll manage to get a seat at one of the little tables outside Toad, especially at the weekend, or when it’s sunny out. As last Saturday was both of those things, we took the bakes home to my flat.
First up, we chopped the everything bagel croissant down the middle and halved it across two little plates. Along with the falafel and aubergine wrap from Falafel and Shawarma on Camberwell Church Street (if I ever get to heaven I believe that God himself will be wielding this in his right hand), I would say that this croissant is probably the local comfort food item I turn to the most, at times of despair or depression or hangovers. It is a beast of a pastry, a meal in itself, modelled on that wonderful, flavourful New York delicacy, the everything bagel, itself an invention that asks: “What if the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat was bread?”
Let me explain the mechanics. The Toad everything bagel croissant is a coil of croissant pastry wound in on itself, with a squeeze of cream cheese at the centre. Across the top are sprigs of verdant dill, with sesame and onion seeds. It is, emphatically, a lot, but it’s also an absolute one-round knockout: salty, buttery pastry, mellow schmear, all pepped up by the herbs. Whenever I eat one of these things, it feels like my birthday.
Once we’d finished this admittedly too-extravagant first course, Hannah and I decided to stick with savouries, so we tackled the cheese straw. I had to pop out for five minutes, leaving her to her own devices, and by the time I got back she had eaten her bit. This is a good testament to how addictive and consistent the Toad cheese straws are, the cheese melted and then hardened again, a little chewy, the way it gets on cold oven pizza, or the corner of a lasagna (surely one of food’s great textures).
After that, we went in on the Danish, which was an impulse buy after one of the Toad bakers had brought an abundant plate of them out just as we reached the till, and our eyes bulged out of our heads like Johnny Bravo’s when he is looking at boobs. The berries glistened in the Saturday sun, slightly sharp, and the custard, made with a lovely touch of vanilla, oozed a little when I cut through with a knife, the consistency so nailed on, so “just right”, that even Goldilocks would have had to take a long drag of her cig and say “fair play”.
We had to throw in the towel there – all pastry freaks have their limits – but I packed Hannah off with the white chocolate and pretzel “puck”, a cookie so dense that it could probably be used as a murder weapon on Eastenders (complimentary)**, while I selfishly kept the soy and sesame fella (one of the three best things you can get at Toad, along with the everything bagel croissant and the tin loaf) for myself. Later on, too, I took a bread knife to the plain croissant to have a look at the cross section, and sure enough, though there was a little doughiness at the centre, it was as lacy inside as a doily on a nan’s bedside table.
After Hannah had left, and I had oozed into my sofa-bound sugar and butter coma – and once I stopped wishing I’d had the foresight to get two soy and sesame cookies – I considered my morning. Specifically, I thought about how my experience in the Toad queue had made me wonder a bit about how a certain type of Londoner consumes a certain type of food.
I am, and have been for some time, absolutely fascinated by London bakery queues, because they tell us so much about what some foods – and the procuring of them – have come to mean in the big roiling money soup that is the experience economy. Social media has made it so that there is status and meaning in everything. Food has become as aspirational a lifestyle component as clothes or interior design (this is something I’ve written about in my column for Polyester before), and shareable experiences are as important for many as tangible possessions. As such, waiting in the bakery queue – or the Supernova Burger queue or the 40 Maltby Street sandwich queue or whatever – is kind of as much a part of the whole package as buying and eating the food from the bakery itself.
I can never get my head around whether I think all of this is good or bad. I don’t think social media’s huge influence on the restaurant and bakery trade is necessarily negative. I’d say it’s helped a lot of struggling businesses, though it has probably skewed lots of priorities too (though to this latter point, I really enjoyed the rationale behind Time Out’s Best London Restaurants list last week, because it particularly embraced institutions where the first hand experience is given precedence). And while I can never help but take the piss, largely because I’m taking aim at myself a little, it’s only natural that if a place is popular online, the demographic you’ll find there will be reasonably social media-pilled in other ways – clothes, brands of dog – also.
At the same time, though, when I consider the impact of social media on food and the places where we eat it, I do always come back to the same hope, which is the one at the heart of this whole project. I just really hope that between taking photos and videos and all of the rest of the stuff that lots of people do when they’re eating now (including me!), there’s time for actually enjoying the experience – getting buttery pastry hands and wiping them on your jeans; widening your eyes at a friend to communicate a surprising taste because your mouth is full – as well as showing it off.
I know that last Saturday I got a few nice pictures of the pastries I ate, absolutely. But I probably won’t go back and look at them loads, let’s be real. What I will remember, though, is the time I spent with Hannah, the stuff we talked about, the actually kind of pleasant way that cheese straw cheese stuck in my teeth, the cute, stupid noise she made because she dropped a blackberry off her bit of Danish – and, fundamentally, how fun it was to share all of those indulgent, inventive Toad Bakery pastries with my pal.
I paid for this visit.
* I actually worked at Forno for a while last year and while I had a great time there, I can say with total confidence and authority that “bloodlust” is genuinely the only word I could have used to describe the maritozzi craze.
** Hannah’s review of the cookie puck, via text, later on:
which, I would say, is as ringing an endorsement as any to be honest.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. It’s free to read every Thursday, but if you’d like to support what we do, you can do so here. To receive Dining Out directly to your inbox, subscribe via the button below:
See you next week!