Guest Check, the most exclusive new bakery in Brooklyn, has arrived.
Just once a month, Pastry chef Grayson Samuels, who uses he/they pronouns, sells pastry boxes made in his Boerum Hill apartment kitchen through Instagram to loyal fans and followers.
The boxes can be reserved only by messaging the Guest Check Instagram account and are available for pickup in Boerum Hill on the last day of the month. The boxes are selling out within hours, despite the project being only two months old.
“I wanted to do something that just felt completely my own, to be able to refine my taste as a chef,” Samuels said.
The name of Samuels’ project is a nod to the green and white slip of paper where servers write down a customer’s order, and each of his pastry boxes is decorated with a guest check with the buyer’s name on it.
There are 30 boxes available at each drop, each of which contains between four and five pastries. That means each month, Samuels is baking 120-150 pastries from their home kitchen, which features a tiny oven that is regularly about 25 degrees off, they said.
“On any basic day, for a small commercial bakery, that’s about as many pastries as they’re going to put out in that setting,” Samuels said. “So to do that from my kitchen is kind of nuts.”
Samuels first started baking when they moved back home to Florida in 2020, where they worked at a bagel shop for about eight months. When they came back to New York in 2021, they ended up working for local pastry legend Caroline Schiff of Gage & Tollner on Fulton Street.
After learning the basics at Gage & Tollner, Samuels started working at Winner Bakery in Park Slope, which had lines out the door during the pandemic and still has everyone talking about croissants. At Winner, the bakers are allowed to come up with weekly specials, so Samuels started experimenting with their own recipes before going into business himself in August 2023.
Now, Samuels comes up with all their own recipes for Guest Check. They regularly draw inspiration from seasonal ingredients: September’s box came with a crisp, buttery Linzer cookie with a window of Concord grape jam.
Most of Samuels' recipes are based around a single ingredient, like September's Roquefort and chive scone with black garlic butter, or the chocolate buckwheat sheet cake. The highlight of the box was the skolbrød, a springy, plush Norwegian pastry dusted with coconut and filled with vanilla custard that felt like eating a childhood memory.
November’s box will likely feature something pumpkin-flavored and December’s box will be filled with Christmas cookies.
“It’s a lot of trusting in my own abilities that it will come together in the end,” Samuels said. “I really believe, in cooking, there’s always a solution. It will always come together. You just have to trust yourself.”
On top of being a pastry chef, Samuels is also an actor — they attended Texas State University to study musical theater, and originally came to New York City to audition for roles.
“I am not the type to just sort of sit around and wait,” Samuels said. “So here I am, pursuing two careers at once. … I love acting so much, and I love cooking so much, and in a perfect world, I will be able to do both one day.”
Although the two careers might seem totally at odds, Samuels manages to bridge the gap with Guest Check by bringing a theatrical mindset to his baking.
“I always want everything to taste as good as it looks, but also, it goes deeper than that,” Samuels said. “Like, what do the ingredients sound like when you hear them together? 'Roquefort and chive scone with black garlic butter' sounds really satisfying. From a theatrical point of view, it’s just really strong storytelling — all these different pieces coming together to give the audience, the eater, one clear image. That’s good theater, you know?”
Guest Check boxes are $30 and there are only 30 available each month. The next drop will be announced here. Customers who place an order will receive a private message with the pick-up address.
