Yellow & Lavender Vegan Eats Share Their Magic, but Not Their Secrets

Taking that first bite of a freshly baked croissant is one of life’s most satisfying culinary pleasures.

The smell of yeast and caramelized butter. The buttery flakes that fall from the corners of your mouth and rain down like glitter pouring from the eyes of the cast of Euphoria as you crunch through the delicate crust. The tender and airy interior that fills your mouth with rich droplets of butter as you begin to chew. It’s all absolute perfection.

Making croissants, however, is an entirely different experience. They are a pain in the ass. They require a days-long and laborious process that demands precision, and no one knows that more than Lucy Pazos and Ryliegh Vieira, co-founders of Nashville’s wholesale and pop-up bakery Yellow & Lavender Vegan Eats. The two haven’t been making croissants long, relatively speaking — they baked their first batch in October 2020 — but the learning curve was steep.

Traditionally, croissants require butter, and lots of it. Baker and cookbook author Claire Saffitz’s recipe for eight plump pastries calls for almost a full pound of the stuff — along with milk, eggs and cream, three more decidedly not-vegan ingredients.

Pazos and Vieira had to all but reinvent the classic pastry to fit their bakery’s plant-based mission.

“It was nerve-racking,” says Pazos about the couple’s first attempt at croissants. “We didn’t sleep for 72 hours. Nobody in Tennessee was making vegan croissants, so we had nowhere to look to but traditional croissants, which is what we used as reference.”

Pazos and Vieira are tight-lipped when I ask about the vegan substitutions in Yellow & Lavender’s treats — but whatever it is they’re doing works. Biting into a Yellow & Lavender croissant is every bit as satisfying as biting into a traditional croissant. The flavor and texture are slightly different than what you would get at, say, Dozen — home of Nashville’s best croissant, if you ask us — but all the elements are there. The shattering, buttery flakes and the tender, pillowy interior.

“Our butter is one of our biggest trade secrets,” says Vieira. “What I will say is that we do not use a $12 block of butter, nor do we use what the vegan community pushes us to use.”

“During our first year as a business, we were bombarded with questions similar to this at markets and even through email from curious yet weary non-vegans that would then turn up their noses at our pastries claiming them to be ‘fake food,’ ” says Pazos. “Over time, we have realized that this type of question is what holds vegan businesses back from being normalized, which is one of the main reasons why we launched our business in the first place.

“We want people who don’t want to harm animals or who are allergic to dairy to have the option of eating a pastry with their coffee or tea at a local shop,” Pazos continues. “This exists in larger cities like New York City and Los Angeles, which were major inspirations to us when we brought them to Nashville. We are on a path to normalize many things in this city, and one is that there’s more than one way to make a pastry — you just have to do your research.”

Every week the couple — who met at Nashville’s 2019 Pride festival and got married in New York in September — bake nearly 900 croissants, cinnamon rolls, Pop-Tart-like hand pies and doughnuts for local restaurants and coffee shops including The Wild Cow, Bongo East, Bongo Java, Fido, Headquarters Coffee & Tea, Matryoshka Coffee, The Loading Dock, five Barista Parlor locations and more.

Recent offerings have included rosemary tarte aux pommes, blueberry and lemon brioche rolls, and cacio e pepe danishes with vegan takes on butter, provolone, Parmesan cheese, and pepper. A few weeks ago they did a run of pastries inspired by the characters of Euphoria. The Fez was a folded croissant with Coca-Cola pickled onions and vegan cheddar, the Jules was a glazed doughnut covered in Fruity Pebbles, and the Maddy was an ube bubble tea croissant. There was a Nate-inspired brioche roll too, but fuck Nate.

The couple also hosts a monthly Doughpe Brunch, where they serve, among other things, croissant crunch cereal — bowls of crispy quarter-sized cinnamon-and-sugar croissants intended to be eaten by the spoonful with your choice of milk. The next event is April 16 at Otto’s. Over the winter, they launched another pop-up food business, The Little Weirdo, home of Nashville’s first vegan smash burgers.

But Pazos and Vieira don’t want to just make good food. They want to cultivate an inclusive community around food.

“When we started in October 2020, nobody could possibly believe or understand why we were making vegan croissants,” says Pazos. “It wasn’t cool or hip, and we got a lot of pushback from people that didn’t understand how important it was to have something as small as a croissant for someone whose diet won’t let them digest milk or eggs.

Pazos continues: “Our bakery has always been 100 percent vegan with gluten-free pastries as well, and our mission is beyond bringing pastries that weren’t available in Nashville, but to also create a safe space for our LGBTQI+ community, and all the minorities we are so proud to represent and shine a light to. We are Nashville’s first and only vegan bakery that is women-, nonbinary-, queer-, immigrant- and Latina-owned and operated.”

And they bake a damn fine croissant. Just don’t ask what they use in place of dairy-based butter — good magicians never reveal their secrets.

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