> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.howardgray.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Groove Theory #34 - The Guava Roll That Worked - URL: https://www.howardgray.net/groove-theory-34-the-guava-roll-that-worked/ - Published: 2026-09-06T06:30:36.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-06T06:30:35.000Z - Description: A Michelin-starred chef opened a bakery because the neighbours kept asking to buy bread. It worked so well they stopped being able to pop in. - Author: Howard Gray - Tags: Groove Theory 🥁 You're tuned in to ****Groove Theory** \- a newsletter about how creative ideas, careers, and live moments find their rhythm, structure, and presence in the world. New here? [Subscribe](https://www.howardgray.net/groove-theory). I'm your host, Howard Gray - founder of [Wavetable](https://rondo.wavetable.net/groove-theory?ref=howardgray.net). Currently: paying homage to GTA via a new London-themed mini game (try it [here](https://staging-rondo.wavetable.net/play/backseat-driver?ref=howardgray.net)!); playing basketball for the first time in 23 years. Groucho Marx resigned by telegram from the Friars Club: *“Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”* I'm the food version. More than a handful of people waiting and I'm not going in. The matcha spot in Flatiron, that pitta place in the railway arch in Hackney - never been in either. Whatever it is, it isn't worth it. There's always something decent round the corner, and there's always home, if I can be bothered to sharpen my knives. One of my few exceptions is a bakery in Mexico City. There’s usually a queue down the block. The gaff is called Panadería Rosetta. And it was a bit of an accident. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d8/1a/d81abdb4-b001-4d5e-9a22-7d2a3d72df17/content/images/2026/09/Rosetta_stock.jpg) Its owner, Elena Reygadas, trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York and cooked under Giorgio Locatelli in London before going home to Mexico City. In 2010 she opened Rosetta in a Porfirian mansion in Colonia Roma - mosaic floors, high ceilings, the lot. It was ranked in Latin America's 50 Best eight times. She won World's Best Female Chef in 2023\. A Michelin star in 2024. Elena picked Roma for reasons that had nothing to do with any of that. She wanted to live there, walk her daughters to school, and walk to work. At the time, Condesa was the fashionable one - not Roma. People who'd eaten at the restaurant wanted to buy the bread. Then the restaurants nearby started turning up in the mornings wanting to buy it too. It opened in 2012, one block away, in a small space. Her reasoning: *"You might not go out for dinner every day, but you might go and buy bread for your family every day. That's what I think is very beautiful about a bakery - it's a more easily accessible place to enjoy every day."* Every day. That's the whole thing. Fine dining is an occasion, and occasions are rare by definition. Bread is… Tuesday morning. --- ## The Tension The pastry that did it was the rol de guayaba - puff pastry around guava jam and a soft cheese filling, which is a French technique wrapped around ate con queso, the guava-paste-and-fresh-cheese thing Mexican kids grow up eating. It became the signature of the neighbourhood. Then of the city. It did what she wanted, at first. *"More people come in more frequently, so we got to know each other better. I love that community feeling."* And then the queue. It runs down the block now, and you hear almost as much English in it as Spanish. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d8/1a/d81abdb4-b001-4d5e-9a22-7d2a3d72df17/content/images/2026/09/image-1.png) Rol de Guayaba I know someone who lived round there. The pastries sold out fast, so going often and getting one were different things. He and his partner got there about once a week. A treat. Elena said she wanted people there every day. He lived close enough to walk it, and it was still a treat. There's a complaint you hear in Mexico City about what all this has done to Roma, and it's a fair one. I'd make it if I had any standing. I don't - I'm part of what's being complained about. An American pal of mine said he'd move to CDMX tomorrow, but only if he could find a way to be properly part of the neighbourhood. Gringo-Digital-Nomadism-get-me-a-skinny-matcha-latte-and-dont-make-the-tacos-spicy-gracias was not for him. Nobody did anything wrong. She didn't raise a drawbridge. She opened a shop and people liked it. Elena chose the bakery *because* it was the format people could use every day. It worked so well that stopping in on your way home is no longer something you can casually do. --- ## Step Into It You might have a version of this. Something you made small on purpose. The monthly dinner for six. The workshop you ran because three people asked. The hour you leave open because you want to be reachable. It worked. It's booked out three months deep now, and the people you built it for are the ones who can't get in - because the people who found it later are better organised. You could ration it. You could raise the price and call it honest. You could leave it and let it find its own level. Or you could accept that this one has stopped doing what you made it for, and go and make another. What did you build it for? And is it still doing that? --- ## The Groove: Modality Elena wasn't picking between the restaurant and the bakery. She went for great *and* every day - the same ideas, the same respect for the ingredients, in something you can hold in one hand on the pavement. As she's put it: *"the fact that one is more casual than the other doesn't mean it's less special."* That combination is the hard one. Most of us settle for one or the other: the brilliant thing that happens rarely, or the available thing that's decent but not spectacular. She took neither. Great, and every day, in a pastry. The queue is the proof. The queue is also what undid it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d8/1a/d81abdb4-b001-4d5e-9a22-7d2a3d72df17/content/images/2026/09/Rosetta.jpg) The line at Rosetta. Photo: Tbhotch, via Wikimedia Commons Call it *format decay*. It only happens to things that are handmade, or hand-delivered. Nobody queues for Coca-Cola - you can always get more of it. But a pastry is laminated one at a time, and a morning has only one of you in it. At its busiest the bakery bakes up to 500 breads a day. That's the ceiling. So every new person who finds it makes it slightly less available, and the people it was built for tend to feel it first. Nobody has to do anything wrong. That's what makes it hard to catch. Which is presumably why she keeps opening things. Lardo. Café Nin. Bella Aurora. Salón Rosetta. --- 🎹 ****Groove Notes** ****1) The reason you chose the format is not guaranteed by the format.** Cheap, quick, casual, open to all - if any of those depend on somebody's hands, success is what erodes them. Format decay. Write down why you picked the vessel, then check annually whether it still does that. Most people never check, because it looks like it's going well. ****2) Who's stopped showing up?** Your numbers won't tell you - they rise while this is happening, or sit flat because you're already at capacity. Regulars thin out, newcomers replace them one for one, and the total doesn’t change much. It's a question you have to answer by name: who was there at the start, and when did you last see them? ****3) If the format stops doing the job, make another one.** Reygadas has six places, not one. The instinct to defend the successful vessel is strong and mostly wrong. Work out what it stopped doing, then go and build the thing that does it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d8/1a/d81abdb4-b001-4d5e-9a22-7d2a3d72df17/content/images/2026/06/Five-Elements-of-Groove_Slim-1.png) Modality is one of the five elements of [Groove Theory ->](https://www.howardgray.net/groove-theory/) --- ## The Release At Wavetable, we do co-locations every few months. We’ve done four of them in Mexico City - more than anywhere else. Rosetta has been involved pretty much every time. So much so, we now have a shorthand. A codeword. ***Rosetta Donuts.*** Not the guava roll. I've had one, once. There's a donut, and that's what we go for. We're not big best-seller people. The phrase means the unreasonably good thing. If somebody walks in with a box the day changes - people stop what they're doing, there is a small amount of undignified behaviour, and whatever you were about to discuss waits ninety seconds. It's come loose from the pastry. It's a standard now - not for everything we make, but for the small, regular things. The weekly treat rather than the big launch. Is this actually Rosetta Donuts, or is it just good? Usually it's just good, alas. The goal is for Wavetable things to travel the same way - a phrase reached for by people who've never worked with us. What I don't want is the queue. I want all sorts of people, able to walk right in and get that ninety seconds. That was her plan too - simply for you to buy bread on a Tuesday. That's one club worth being a member of. Howard --- ## Extended Mix - **On why bread specifically:** *"Bread is meant to be shared, and torn by hand, not cut. Bread brings you closer to others."* The format shapes the behaviour. Fine dining is a performance you watch; a loaf is something you can pull apart with somebody. - **In defence of the queue:** Fortune ran a piece in July on [conspicuous waiting](https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/rise-conspicuous-waiting-19th-century-070000839.html?ref=howardgray.net) \- Veblen's conspicuous consumption, updated. The line is no longer the price of the thing, it's part of the thing, and you post it online. An hour outside a bakery for an eleven-dollar cake, photographed. Which complicates the argument above: plenty of people in that queue are enjoying it, and some of them want it long. Just not the ones who used to pop in on a Tuesday. (My position remains that of Groucho’s, btw)