After discovering new favorites to indulge in over Halloween – raspberry & licorice skulls being at the top of this list, and crispy bacon chocolate being a bit further down, it was time to even up the scales with some healthier treats. An article in The New Yorker about Hamdi Ulukaya and the American dream whetted my appetite for some authentic Greek style yogurt. Hamdi left Turkey for NYC some years ago in search of his fame and fortune. His family were shepherds and cheese makers, and he was looking for a new life. As fate would have it, an ironic opportunity and the changing American palate intervened, which saw Hamdi purchase an old yogurt factory upstate and very successfully establish Chobani. His yogurt is now on supermarket shelves all over the city, but the flagship store in Soho is a marketing dream.

On the corner of Prince and West Broadway, the store is a picture of freshness. My heart was already wistful with the memory of the Selcuk markets in western Turkey where we tasted some astonishingly good yogurt a couple of years ago. Somehow the generosity of spirit in the store tapped into this and the yogurt was a winner even before I tried it. Dazzling displays of honey and olive oil underscoring pictures of colourful combinations made the Turkish Greek collaboration a consumer quandary. Finally an offer of chai spiced apple and walnut from the greeter made the decision for me – I was curious about the smoked salmon and dill, but it was a bit early in the morning…

Being in Soho, I was in the neighborhood of Dominique Ansel’s Bakery and my curiosity about the current state of cronuts encouraged me to ride around the corner. There was no queue! The sign out front introducing a magic soufflé implied the frenchman was looking to pull another surprise out of his hat. But for the moment, there were only a handful of people in the store and at 10am, 6 months after the craze took off, I bought 2 salted caramel cronuts without much fanfare. The gold box that had been such an envied treasure only a short time ago was now a little passé, but there was still some status in the $1 postcard – and maybe more taste. The cronut was, after all, a deep-fried donut. The emperor may need new clothes, but if the magic can provide some fun, or inspire a little transcendental travel to Turkey, then we are whey ahead….