“I was looking at other bakeries for a way to boost business,” says Jonathan Ory, the big, bearded maker of delicate French pastries at Bad Wolf Coffee. “I saw the way other places were making a killing on doughnuts with all these weird flavors—Chicagoans will eat anything if it’s got a hole in it. I played with some things like a red velvet canele, but to me the real action seemed to be in these fusion pastries, like the Cronut. So that’s pretty much where the idea came from.”

Ory goes in the back of his shop and brings out a fresh tray of kouign-amanns, the buttery glazed laminated pastry that have become his hallmark. “I already had something people loved,” he says, as he peels them off the sheet of wax paper, pulling up thin layers of baked caramel with each one. “But I needed a way to expand that market into other dayparts to fully monetize that core competency. So I thought, why not add savory flavors?”

That’s when you realize that there’s something different about Bad Wolf today— a hint of Italian seasoning and oregano in the air. Ory opens a pot of simmering beef. He pulls out a pair of tongs and pulls out the thinly sliced beef and places it on one of the pastries. He spoons out some giardiniera from a jar, then closes the sandwich with the second kouign-amann. Then he grips the whole sandwich with tongs and gives it a dip in the broth.

The taste is transformative, the butteriness of the pastry adding a richer mouthfeel to the traditional salty, spiced beef which the vinegariness of the giardiniera cuts through. “I experimented with some other cross-cultural combinations— the beurre-ito, the Paris Breast-of-chicken caesar, the Sloppy Joe Canele-wich— and I’ll probably keep working on them. But honestly, this one was such a natural that I figure I’ll probably be dealing with lines out the door for Boeuf-Amann for at least six months before I have to invent something else to keep Chicagoans happy. Like a carrot muffin with pulled pork on it, or just squirting lard directly into your coffee or something. If I can keep coming up with these, in five years I can retire.”