Culture
How a cafe brought the viral Olympic Village muffins to NYC — and back again for Paralympics
Like many culture-shaping trends, it started on TikTok.
Posts by Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen, now widely known as the “muffin man,” showcased the chocolate muffins served in the Olympic Village during the Summer Games. Christiansen’s posts, highlighting his adoration of the fudgy morsels, drew millions of views as he competed at the Paris Olympics and led to numerous duplicate muffin recipes (including one in The New York Times).
But one New York City-based fan of Christiansen’s posts didn’t want to settle for only a reproduction.
Instead, Kelin Carolyn Zhang, a 32-year-old independent designer, wondered if she could try the real deal. There was an initial hurdle, however, since the supplier of the famed Olympic chocolate muffins, Coup de Pates, completes only wholesale orders such as those placed by restaurants and businesses rather than direct-to-consumer, she said. As she attempted to obtain the authentic muffins, Zhang documented her research and her quest to bring them stateside on TikTok, leading to a connection in the restaurant industry that helped make her wish possible.
“The entire situation just kept escalating, and I found it incredibly hilarious, and so I kept going,” Zhang said.
The “extremely random rabbit hole” of muffin research, as she described it, eventually resulted in a shipment of 15 cases containing 300 of the chocolate muffins — presumably the same ones served to athletes at the Olympics and Paralympics, though Coup de Pates did not respond to requests for comment on the topic. The muffins were air-freighted overnight on dry ice on a flight from Paris Orly Airport to Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, Zhang said. The shipment required FDA approval, and the muffins had to clear customs before they were transported by van to the New York cafe Isshiki Matcha in the East Village, where the first pop-up event was held Aug. 17.
Once the event was announced, something of a local frenzy ensued. The first customer lined up outside the cafe at 6 a.m. — the event started four hours later. The line wrapped around the block twice, and the muffins — limited to one per customer for $10 — sold out in roughly two hours, according to Isshiki Matcha owner Angel Zheng, who said her friends who arrived late didn’t get one.
Zheng became involved after a friend tagged her in one of Zhang’s TikTok posts and suggested the two women work together to bring the muffins to New York City.
“I just really like side quests,” Zheng said. “I like doing things for the plot. I’m very young — I’m 24. I’m not a big corporation. I don’t have a boss with a 20-person chain of command. I open restaurants and it brings so much joy to people. So I was like, if it works, it works. And if it doesn’t, at least we tried.”
Pulling off the event was no small feat, as the process included many logistical hurdles, which Zhang recounted in detail on X. Coup de Pates had never exported to New York before, so there was no system in place to get the goods from the plane to the restaurant, as Zheng was used to with other suppliers, meaning she and Zhang had to coordinate ground transportation. Zheng also said she purchased a new fridge for the restaurant big enough to store all the muffins, and that costs accounting for customs and transportation were expensive, but she was “glad to do it.”
Plus, it wasn’t a one-off. Isshiki Matcha announced a second pop-up event beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday with the Paralympics underway. This time, they placed a bigger order — for 1,000 muffins, which Zhang said they’ll sell until supplies run out.
Zhang said she expects a smaller turnout this time given the late notice on the announcement and figures potential customers may be out of town for the holiday weekend.
olympic muffins are back in nyc for the paralympics!
available 10am tomorrow (sat 8/31), 1 per person, first come first serve @ isshiki matcha
got 1000 muffs this time. popup continues to sunday if supplies last https://t.co/sPoxMoLnH2 pic.twitter.com/E26ajZAach
— kelin (@kelin_online) August 30, 2024
But Zhang said she was already able to try a second muffin thanks to the latest shipment. Despite all the coordination of the first event, she tried only one given the demand.
“Can you believe it?” she said.
According to Zhang and Zheng, the hype surrounding the muffins is valid. And yes, Zhang confirmed, they are chocolate cakes. Zheng said she thinks it’s the best muffin she’s ever tried, adding to a chorus of positive reviews of the treats, many shared on TikTok, including by American Olympians Gabby Thomas, Tara Davis-Woodhall, Abbey Weitzeil and Torri Huske. More reviews could be forthcoming during the Paralympics, as the Paralympic Games X account seemed to indicate the muffins were available to competitors.
Okay…we need to know if any of our Paralympians have tried THE chocolate muffin in the athlete’s village yet 🍫
Athletes tag in and let us know…
📸 Getty Images pic.twitter.com/r8jgZ6BSwE
— Paralympic Games (@Paralympics) August 29, 2024
The popularity of the pastries has transcended the athlete’s village, and thanks to Zhang and Zheng, the muffins have reached a new set of reviewers on another continent.
“I feel like the magic of these muffins is that no one could get their hands on them besides Olympic athletes,” Zheng said. “I don’t think that it’s about making chocolate muffins.”
Zheng added that her takeaway from the endeavor was that “anything’s possible with the power of the internet.”
Zhang, whose background is in digital product design, said she had never worked in partnership with a restaurant or cafe before her muffin search and that “hopefully this whole story can inspire other people to take matters into their own hands.”
“The (first) muffin pop-up itself was so wholesome,” she said. “People were having fun in line. That’s what I’m really proud of — is just helping people have a good time and come together.”
She wasn’t aware of any plans for a third pop-up and highlighted the relevant events.
“I do think it’s pretty special to keep it just around the Olympics and Paralympics,” she said. “And that adds to the overall excitement.”
Regardless, Zhang’s quest had a satisfying end. She and Zheng — along with those dedicated enough to their shared muffin pursuits to wait out the lines — finally ate like Olympians.
(Photo courtesy of Kelin Carolyn Zhang)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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