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If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like behind the scenes of a restaurant, this is for you. In Behind the Line, photojournalists take you inside the kitchen for a unique perspective on everything that goes into a single day of service, and the people who make it all happen.
In this edition, we get a glimpse into a day at Chicago’s Cafe Yaya, from photographer and journalist Laura Scherb.
When Cafe Yaya, the casual sister concept to highly acclaimed Middle Eastern tasting menu stalwart Galit first opened last year, they did so with just coffee and pastries. Then, they added more substantial breakfast sandwiches, a brunch menu, and, most recently, a full menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, cementing their status as Lincoln Park’s new all-day destination.
The backbone of the day-to-night menu at Cafe Yaya is the pastry program. Over the course of a single year, the team has built out an impressive menu that covers a wide range of pastries and breads, including recipes inspired by traditional Levantine bakes. At the helm is executive pastry chef Mary Eder-McClure, who worked at Galit before being asked by co-owners Zachary Engel and Andrés Clavero to take the reins at Cafe Yaya.
Eder-McClure and her team are the engine behind some of the signature dishes that diners enjoy from the moment Cafe Yaya’s doors open until the final check is closed for the night. From baked goods that do double duty as components of the dinner menu and breakfast sandwiches to the small but mighty dessert menu, every item embodies a careful approach. Over the first year of operations, the team iterated and carefully honed each recipe. The result is a collection of thoughtful offerings that pull the cozy, all-day cafe through a long service, with offerings that serve everyone from the remote workers using Cafe Yaya as a third space to the Lincoln Park families who show up for a night out.
I spent the day with the pastry team recently, which just so happened to be the day before Cafe Yaya celebrated a year in business. It felt like perfect timing to shadow the well-oiled team to see how they bake up the magic of Yaya.
30 minutes before Cafe Yaya opens, a half rack of pastries is transported upstairs and the pastry case is stocked with the pastries that the morning baker, who started at 4 a.m., has been working on. The smell is heavenly. I notice that there are two cake stands off to the side, and when I ask why, Eder-McClure explains that these are the gluten-free and vegan pastries. Cafe Yaya always has allergen-friendly offerings on the menu, a point of pride for the staff.
Jaye Fong, one of the pastry cooks, cuts butter for the doughs she’ll mix over the course of her shift. The name of the game at Cafe Yaya is to work ahead—with service from 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., the baked goods need to be prepped well in advance to give customers a fully-proofed final product. As you might guess, Cafe Yaya goes through quite a bit of butter to churn out all of the pastries and breads that are served during a 15-hour service.
The proofing oven is full of dough slowly rising to its full potential. Many of the baked goods and bread at Cafe Yaya use the sourdough starter that the kitchen maintains. The starter, named Crustina, is extremely active and fed every day. The staff has worked hard to hone in on a feeding schedule that gives Crustina a mild, not-too-sour taste while also optimizing the rise that she gives their doughs. The starter, which Eder-McClure kicked off in a Mason jar, is now kept in a 12-quart container.
As one baker works on proofing and shaping the doughs that will be baked today, another works on mixing the doughs that will be baked later in the week. Eder-McClure takes a collaborative approach, holding discussions with her team that result in pastries like the mushroom bourguignon savory bun that’s in the case right now. “I’m so proud of the team,” she says. “I want them to feel empowered and excited.”
Eder-McClure starts cooking staff breakfast for the team. It’s one of her favorite parts of the day, she says. Using leftover ingredients in a process she compares to Chopped, she fashions a wholesome meal for employees to fuel up. Today, it’s a vegetable stew, beet salad, and rice.
Kara Hance, a sous chef, makes the quiches, cracking egg after egg. She tells me that during the weekend brunch services, the team will go through up to 600 eggs over the course of two days. The rough puff quiche crusts are par-baked with pie weights, then filled with seasonal fillings and topped with a mixture of eggs and heavy cream for a light, custard-y texture.
Hance laminates the croissant dough that was mixed the day before. This process is made easier with the sheeter (dubbed Lenny). The croissant dough is a huge point of pride for this tight-knit team. They’ve been tweaking it slowly and incrementally over the last year, experimenting with different types of butter and fermentation times to get the best layers possible. As Hance laminates today’s croissant dough, Fong tests the dough that’s bulk fermenting for tomorrow and makes sure it passes the “windowpane test,” by stretching a small piece of dough into a thin sheet to see if it’s been kneaded enough.
Recently, Eder-McClure sat down with the sales data from the year and analyzed which pastry offerings sold well and which needed improving. One item she changed? The borekas, a flaky pastry that wasn’t selling as well as she wanted it to. She reformatted it to be a “stuffed breakfast sandwich,” and now it’s a best-seller.
The simits come out of the oven. A traditional Turkish recipe that features twisted dough, simit is one of the items that features sourdough starter. Bread has been a learning experience for the entire team, Eder-McClure tells me, from the starter maintenance to the baking.
Fong mixes the biscuit dough, which she calls the ultimate workout. Once the dough is mixed and rolled out, using the special rolling pin that she chose specifically for items like biscuits, she cuts them into precise squares and transfers them to the freezer until they’re needed. The biscuits are a staple of the breakfast, brunch, and lunch menus.
Hance slices the New York-style cheesecake, the current Slice of the Day offering for the dinner menu. There are only four desserts on offer at Cafe Yaya: Slice of the Day, a sundae, affogato, and baklava. This menu is kept tight intentionally—because the pastry team doesn’t work the dinner shift, the front of house staff is in charge of plating desserts. This unique set up is intentional and functional: Eder-McClure says that it breaks down the divide between the front of house and back of house staff and encourages collaboration and connectivity between the pastry and savory teams.
Hance uses the laminated croissant dough, now fully chilled, to make the Cubano croissants, layering them with mustard, relish, ham, and cheese before rolling them into tight cylinders.
It’s hard to believe that these will expand and puff in the oven to create the monstrosity of a croissant that is one of their best-selling pastry case items. The team has started making the croissants larger since first opening, to the delight of diners.
The kitchen fills with the aroma of rosemary and garlic as the focaccia’s enormous bubbles brown in the oven. The focaccia is another bread with the sourdough starter as the base, helping give it its airy texture. After the dough rises and is topped with rosemary and whole cloves of garlic, the focaccia is drizzled with a generous coating of olive oil. The bakers create the almost comically large bubbles of air by pressing their fingers gently into the dough, creating crispy pockets of olive oil and sea salt.
At the moment, there’s a special dish on the dinner menu that Eder-McClure developed as a way to highlight the focaccia: bistro-inspired mussels with harissa, charred tomato, and lamb merguez, served alongside pillowly slices to mop up the sauce. In this way, the menu is extremely collaborative; especially at lunch, the savory chefs work closely with Eder-McClure and her team to develop dishes that make the best use of the pastries and bread as possible. Creative uses for leftover baked goods include croutons for salad and baklava ice cream crumbles.
The racks begin to fill as the pastries for day service and dinner service finish up in the oven.
Alyssa Meza, a pastry cook, walks me though making baklava—one of the pastry items that sells through from the moment they open until the moment they close. The baklava, which was also served at Galit, has always been the same recipe and is extremely popular for events and catering. The phyllo dough is layered with clarified butter, a spiced nut filling, and syrup.
Hance powers up the ice cream machine to spin sesame ice cream with halva chunks for Galit. They only have a Pacojet next door, so Cafe Yaya’s kitchen takes care of this dessert.
Fong starts doing “the pull” for the following day’s pastries. Frozen pastries are pulled from plastic containers and divided amongst sheet trays to slowly start defrosting and proofing. The muffin tins for the kouign-amans are coated in a generous layer of sugar, which will create a caramelly crust as they bake. They’ll come to temperature overnight in the walk-in and be baked by the morning baker tomorrow starting at 4 a.m.
The kitchen warms as the oven is cranked up to bake the baguettes in a steam-filled oven fitted with baking stones. To get an optimal crust on baked goods like their baguettes, the team uses a combination of baking stones and steam, which they hit upon after plenty of experimenting. These golden baguettes are the ones that will be cut up and served for dinner at Cafe Yaya tonight.
