Fastelavn bun season is coming. Or so they say at Ole & Steen, the Danish bakery that started a local chain here a few years ago.

M. gets the credit for noticing the white paper on the windows of the former Aroma, which closed in December 2020. A note to the real estate agent for the space, Marc Sitt, filled in the blanks. Their website says coming soon — I will update with the “when” shortly. UPDATE FROM O&S: We will be opening very early April, we are very excited!?

I included the bakery’s Broadway and 18th location for this field trip to Madison Square Park largely because at the time (March) they had homemade peeps. But they are known for their rustic breads and their “Cinnamon Social,” a cinnamon pastry with vanilla custard that is especially popular in London, where they have 16 shops.

Their aesthetic looks A+ to me — do the Scandinavians ever get it wrong? — and their prices are reasonable. A breakfast sandwich is $7; a roast beef sandwich is $9.50; three pastries are $13.

Here’s their origin story from their website:
“It all started in 1991. Ole Kristoffersen and Jane Borup opened the first bakery on the ground floor in Copenhagen, more specifically Christianshavns Torv. If you stand on Christianshavns Torv and look up and down the building, you will see why we are called Lagkagehuset in Denmark. Lagkagehuset means ‘layer-cake’ in Danish so the name came quite naturally, because the beautiful square building from 1930 looks like a giant layer cake with the alternating whipped cream and cream-colored layers. When we opened our first stores outside Denmark in 2016 in London we named our stores “Ole & Steen” abroad likewise when we first opened in New York.”

 

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