San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

During the first terrifying shutdowns of the pandemic, Pulitzer-nominated photographer Jeffrey Brown and his partner started lowering bread out the window of his third-story studio in downtown San Diego. They used a basket and rock-climbing rope (Brown is serious about rocks and ropes, and once climbed El Capitan). People—very few people, at first—would pay for the bread Brown and his partner Jenny Chen were making upstairs. They’d always enjoyed food, pored over cooking mags, and made elaborate meals together. But the pandemic activated their obsession: the perfect croissant. They only had a single small oven in the studio. It was a commercial photo studio, not a commercial bakery. “We made so many bad croissants,” Jeffrey says. “But being a structural engineer, [Jeffrey] took notes,” Jenny clarifies. “I have 726 pages of them,” Jeffrey confirms. “We’d make a batch, tweak, take notes, try different butters and flours and techniques—700 pages later, we found our croissant.” Jenny built a series of computers a