'Cronut, crookie, cruffin': Franken-pastries invade Paris Olympics. Simone Biles is a fan

PARIS − Stéphane Louvard rises each day when the City of Light has none, and like Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's gothic story, builds a creature in his laboratory − only it's made of butter, flour and sugar and fuses American and French culture in an unorthodox pastry experiment.

Louvard is a 51-year-old Parisian with the floury-white pallor of his chosen profession's most important ingredient. As far as anyone can tell, he is the original inventor and baker of the "crookie," a croissant-cookie-dough mashup. It may sound like a wandering baked good with no memory or past, a patisserie version of Shelly's character. But it's proven enormously popular in Paris. Industry experts say it's part of a growing French appetite for American pastry.

"Some people love it. Some hate it. But, in the end, everyone wants to try it," Louvard said of his soft, gooey yet crispy-flaky creation in an interview Friday in the warren-like subterranean kitchen of Maison Louvard, his bakery in Paris' ninth arrondissement. On a normal summer's day, Louvard said he sells about 2,000 crookies.

Because the Olympics are in town − the Games wrap up Aug. 11, then resume Aug. 28 with the Paralympics − and France's capital has emptied out of locals, who also go on vacation in August, he's doing about a quarter of that.

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But Louvard didn't seem too annoyed by the production ramp-down.

Pffft, or whatcha gonna do?

"It's easier," he said, with a Gallic shrug, of the fewer people who have been clamoring for his crookies since late July, when the Games began. This was accompanied by a "pfft" sound, a kind of French "whatcha gonna do?"

Louvard invented the crookie in 2022. He has no deep explanation as to why. His traditional croissants were selling well. He was not aiming to be a pastry revolutionary. The idea came. He rolled with it, in both senses. For a few years, Louvard would sell a few hundred crookies over the course of a weekend. That all changed in 2024 when a French social media influencer's video about the Franco-American hybrid when viral on TikTok.

Demand soared.

The crookie went A-list. Famous pasty chefs were suddenly celebrating it. It traveled the world, spawning imitators from Los Angeles to Singapore. Soon after the most decorated Olympic gymnast in history arrived in Paris for the Olympics, a video appeared of Simone Biles holding a box of Louvard's crookies in the Olympic Village.

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An existential moment for crookies

Louvard's son, Nicolas, who manages Maison Louvard's social media accounts, said a French journalist from Libération, a daily newspaper co-founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, a writer, political activist and one of the key figures of the philosophy of existentialism, picked up two boxes of crookies and helped deliver them to Biles. The bakery's Instagram account features a video, published in December last year, captioned "Behind our crookies."

Still, it's not just Louvard's marriage of what is perhaps France's most emblematic baked good with the all-American chocolate chip cookie that is upending pastry circles in a country with a venerated gastronomic tradition.

"Donuts, cookies, frozen cookie dough in supermarkets − these types of items are everywhere in France now," said Nicolas Nouchi, founder of Strateg’eat, which describes itself as a food strategy and "eatertainment" consultancy.

Nouchi said France's "snacking universe," which includes the classic corner boulangerie, is growing and changing. He credited this to the influence of social media and a "will to go closer to the American experience," especially among younger generations who want "convenient and sweet solutions for desserts." Nouchi said 20 years ago France had about 13,000 "quick-service outlets" − fast food restaurants and stores. Today, it's 55,000.

That may not be a huge surprise. Like most big cities around the world, Paris has it's fair share of small chains selling globalized quick eats such as tacos, bagels and sushi. McDonald's and Burger King combined have about 2,000 restaurants across France, with 20-30 new outlets opening each year.

The "Americanization" of some parts of the French bakery experience is newer, said Nouchi.

One example:

In a city overflowing with bakeries and artisan pastry shops, when American chain Krispy Kreme opened its doors in France in December 2023 long lines formed on the streets of Paris for its brightly colored donuts. French media ran stories about how American movies featuring donut-eating cops and the animated sitcom "The Simpsons" popularized the donut in the French popular imagination. (They may not have known that when Krispy Kreme's founder Vernon Rudolph opened his first store in 1937 he did so after buying a secret, yeast-raised donut recipe from a French chef in New Orleans. Or maybe they did, and that was part of the attraction?)

To be sure, Louvard is not the only baker making American-French Franken-pastries.

The most well-known example of the genre may be New York-based French pastry chef Dominique Ansel's Cronut, named by Time Magazine in 2013 as one of the year's 25 best inventions. Ansel says the Cronut, which he's trademarked, hence the capitalization, is often mistaken as croissant dough that's been fried. Not the case, he insists, because it's made with a proprietary "laminated dough" recipe that takes, along with the filings, glazings and decor, three days to make from start to finish. Whatever the case, it's half-donut, half-croissant and it drove New Yorkers out of their minds a decade ago when it first debuted, with some scalping them on Craigslist for up to $40.

"It was this organic moment where we created something that was, in theory, very simple to understand − a pastry that had that familiar doughnut shape, with flaky layers similar to a croissant," Ansel said in an interview.

Also outside France, and perhaps proving a variation on the old adage that you can take the croissant out of France but when you take the France out of the croissant you end up with the "cruffin" (Australia and U.S.), "croloaf" (Britain), "cretzel" (U.S.), "croclair" (South Africa) and the "croffle" (South Korea).

In France itself there are a new generation of pastry shops that go well beyond the pain au chocolat and lean, in places, l'américain. At Bo & Mie, a small Paris chain which bills itself as a "boulangerie creative," you can get a "New York Roll," which is like a circular caramelized croissant filled with pastry cream and topped with a chocolate ganache or some other seasonal flavor. But that too, as the name suggests, traces to the U.S., New York's Lafayette Grand Café and Bakery specifically, though it has since invaded France and many other parts of the world.

At Land & Monkeys, another mostly Paris-based temple of fat and sugar, there is what is described as a vegan "Peanut Choco Cookie" (America again). Land & Monkey's Instagram account is filled with French people from the provinces asking when a branch will be opening in a town or city near them. At Liberté, meanwhile, an upscale Paris bakery that claims to combine "architecture and tradition" in its doughy delights, there is a "Chocolate & Almond Babka," a sweet braided bread that originated in Jewish communities in Eastern Europe; Poland and Ukraine chiefly.

That said, it's not all change.

According to the French National Confederation of Bakery and Pastry, an industry group which represents 33,000 bakers in France, six billion baguettes − long, thin, crusty − are still made in France every year. The very French symbol is widely consumed with spreads, toppings, or fillings, in the morning and at night, all day in fact, though reports vary on how many baguettes the average French person consumes.

Every two days? Fifteen a month? The bakers don't appear to have a solid number.

They appear to be popular in the Olympic Village, too, though Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen has become, for some, the Games' breakout TikTok star for posting videos about chocolate muffins (national lineage unclear).

Étienne Thobois, a former French Olympic badminton player who is now CEO of the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, said in a briefing with reporters late last month that more than 1,000 baguettes were being distributed in the village each day.

There's about 10,500 athletes competing in Paris. That's one per? You do the math.

Louvard, of the crookie, said that ultimately he believes France's pastry scene remains dominated by "the classics." He said younger people were perhaps more inclined to try new varieties. Older generations, in his experience were not. It's not quite clear where the crookie's originator falls in this demographic breakdown. He's not interested in moving beyond the crookie, in terms of experimentation. He's heard of the Cronut. He hasn't tried one.

Louvard insisted Parisians weren't getting overly irritated by American-style imports.

"There's room for everything here," he said.

Ansel, who gave the world the Cronut, said, "there is always something so comforting about the classics − good croissants, good baguettes and viennoiserie. Those are often the hardest things to perfect."

And he said these, fresh out the oven from a local bakery, "will never go out of style" in France.

Ansel has also continued to push forward into unchartered, fully-trademarked bakery territory.

"We have this saying here: 'don't let the creation kill the creativity,'" he said. "It's why we launched the Frozen S'more right after the Cronut, then we launched the Cookie Shot, then the Blossoming Hot Chocolate."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: American Franken-pastries invade 2024 Paris Olympics