The popular NYC pastry you can now find in the Bay Area

For Bay Area food influencer Rachel Lee, who has 45,000 followers on Instagram, the whole Suprême craze was intriguing but unattainable — until she came across Marvel Cake. 

“I really wanted to try it, but I also didn’t want to fly all the way out to New York City just to get a pastry,” Lee said. “So I found out Marvel Cake was serving up this spiral croissant on TikTok. … And I saw that it was gaining traction on there. So I knew I had to visit it myself.”

Marvel Cake is a French bakery in Campbell that opened in early 2020. While it calls its version “spiral croissants,” not Suprêmes, the pastries look nearly identical to the famous New York dessert.

By the time Lee made it to Marvel Cake last November, the croissant was already growing in popularity. She waited in line for about 30 minutes and documented her experience trying the pastries on video. She couldn’t compare it with the original, but she was impressed. 

“It was really good,” she said. “I think my favorite was probably the chocolate one. It kind of tasted like your traditional chocolate croissant, but elevated and a little bit more flaky and crispy and buttery.”

The internet was equally impressed: Her Instagram reel has since soared to nearly a million views. 

Marvel Cake owners and husband-and-wife team Reza Mirzadeh and Maryam Menbari had no idea what they were in for. 

“We had a normal life until the spiral,” Mirzadeh said. “… All of a sudden, one day when we came to open the door, I saw the line was going all the way to the end of the shopping center. And I was like, what’s going on?”

Mirzadeh claimed that he didn’t even know what TikTok was until it showed up at his front door. While the owners were overwhelmed in the beginning, they are ultimately very grateful for the social media buzz. 

“We spent a lot of money for advertising before on Instagram, Facebook, Yelp, and you know, the response was OK,” Mirzadeh said. “… But that 10-second TikTok video was something else.”

The baker behind Marvel Cake, Menbari is a self-taught pastry chef with a background in graphic design. She first trained herself to bake cakes 14 years ago, when she couldn’t find a bakery able to make the custom-designed cake she wanted for her husband’s 40th birthday. 

As Menbari improved her baking skills, mostly by watching videos online, the couple converted their laundry room into an additional kitchen. Menbari’s art background, as well as the years she spent working at luxury jeweler Tiffany, shone through in her lavishly decorated cake designs. She began baking cakes and cupcakes for weddings and birthdays, as well as for tech companies like Google.

After renting commercial kitchens for a few years, the couple decided it was time for their own brick-and-mortar location. They found the Campbell space, which was a dog training facility at the time, and completely transformed it into an elegant, gold-accented French bakery with enticing glass displays of glossy fruit tarts, eclairs and macarons. 

The timing of their opening was unfortunate — just weeks before the pandemic shutdown — but they pulled through, slowly building a loyal following in the South Bay. 

When Menbari first saw a video of Lafayette’s Suprême last year, she decided to try re-creating it. 

“I saw that video from the New York place,” she said. “And I asked my chef, OK, let’s make something similar. It took a long time.” 

Since Menbari’s background is in cakes, she hired pastry chef Maliheh Sadeghi, who worked in French bakeries in Montreal, to help craft Marvel Cake’s other confections. The two of them worked diligently on the spiral croissant recipe for two weeks until they finally perfected it. 

The process goes as follows: After making the dough and proofing it for two to three hours, the chef cuts and rolls it into tightly wound spirals. She then places them in circular molds, bakes them, and then flips them and bakes them for longer. After baking, the croissants have to cool down to room temperature before the chef can inject the pastry cream — the three flavors they offer are chocolate, pistachio and strawberry. Finally, she drizzles them with more flavored cream (or chocolate ganache) and adds grated chocolate, fresh pistachios or dried strawberries as garnish. 

The croissants are extraordinarily time-consuming — almost 10 hours from start to finish — so they make only about 250 per day. On weekends, people start lining up at Marvel Cake before it opens, and the bakery generally sells out within the first 45 minutes. Each customer is allowed to purchase only one of every flavor. The pastries cost $7.50 each. 

“I have customers that have told me they drive from Tracy, Carmel or San Francisco,” Menbari said. “Sometimes, I feel so bad because they want to buy more, but I’m like, sometimes the people get mad. Look at the line, it’s not fair to other customers.” 

For those hoping to get their hands on a spiral croissant, Menbari’s advice is to come early (they don’t make more batches throughout the day). Also, weekdays are far less busy than weekends, and customers can order in advance if they want to buy more than six. Plus, some good news: Marvel Cake plans to open a second bakery, in Palo Alto, in mid-March.

If you’re lucky enough to get one, biting into a spiral croissant is a textural joy — crispy on the outside, fluffy and creamy on the inside. None of the flavors are overly sweet, but the richness of the chocolate is particularly decadent. If you can, enjoy your spiral croissant at a bistro table in the bakery with a pot of floral tea, and soak in the little luxury of it all. 

For once, a TikTok trend that tastes as good as it looks. 

Marvel Cake, 1614 W. Campbell Ave., Campbell. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-7 pm.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.