croissant

I’m going to introduce you to your new favorite chocolate chip cookie. It’s a sizable bronze round with big boulders of semisweet chocolate buried into the surface. The center is soft and chewy, with a lavish brown butter flavor that carries notes of toffee. It’s surrounded in a halo of crisp, golden cookie and finished with a sprinkling of salt. The cookie can go toe to toe with the one you make at home, and whatever other cookie you love around town.

“We had a cookie, but it didn’t work because it was too gluten-free tasting,” says owner Leah Di Bernardo. “I tasked Helen Cho, our lead baker, with using brown butter to make the cookie, and she did.”

Di Bernardo and her daughter, Gigi, run the Pasadena bakery, where the cookie, and everything else at the restaurant, is gluten-free.

In the bakery case, you’ll find tender, cheesy biscuits made with almond flour, decadent doughnuts topped with passion fruit, mini Basque cheesecakes with almond and coconut flour crust and wedges of vegetable frittata.

Di Bernardo transitioned out of a career in film production in the early 2000s to open Eat Marketplace in Temecula. She grew up on a small farm in Oregon, cooked throughout Europe in the ‘80s and ‘90s and was an early adopter of the slow food movement before it had a name, or a following.

“We choose to not be too preachy, but to gently encourage people to understand the connection of your food and the beauty of your food and what it can do for all of us,” says Di Bernardo.

The Pasadena bakery and coffee shop was mostly gluten-free when it opened near the end of 2023, but after feedback from customers, Gigi and her mother transitioned the business to completely gluten-free in 2024.

The biscuits incorporate almond flour, yogurt and eggs, based on a family recipe developed by one of Di Bernardo’s sisters. For breakfast, they’re split and used to cradle eggs, bacon and cheese.

The doughnuts are baked into small rounds and glazed with chocolate, maple, matcha and seasonal fruit flavors. Recently, a passion fruit doughnut featured a dollop of the sharp, tropical fruit in the center.

“All the baked goods have always been culinary driven, or farm-to-table, before it was cool,” says Di Bernardo. “We built really strong relationships with our farmers and anything that can be upcycled, we do it.”

Yes, Oprah Winfrey has discussed her weight loss and weight gain and weight in general before — many, many times before. The difference this time around, she says, is how little food noise there is in her daily life, and how little shame. It’s so quiet, in fact, that she can eat a whole croissant and simply acknowledge she had breakfast.

“Food noise,” for those who don’t experience it, is a virtually nonstop mental conversation about food that, according to Tufts Medicine, rarely shuts up and instead drives a person “to eat when they’re not hungry, obsess over meals and feel shame or guilt about their eating habits.”

“This type of obsessive food-related thinking can override hunger cues and lead to patterns of overeating, undereating or emotional eating — especially for people who are overweight,” Tufts said.

Winfrey told People in an exclusive interview published Tuesday that in the past she would have been thinking, “‘How many calories in that croissant? How long is it going to take me to work it off? If I have the croissant, I won’t be able to have dinner.’ I’d still be thinking about that damn croissant!”

What has changed is her acceptance 2½ years ago that she has a disease, obesity, and that this time around there was something not called “willpower” to help her manage it.

The talk show host has been using Mounjaro, one of the GLP-1 drugs, since 2023. The weight-loss version of Mounjaro is Zepbound, like Wegovy is the weight-loss version of Ozempic. Trulicity and Victroza are also GLP-1s, and a pill version of Wegovy was just approved by the FDA.

When she started using the injectable, Winfrey told People she welcomed the arrival of a tool to help her get away from the yo-yo path she’d been on for decades. After understanding the science behind it, she said, she was “absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself” after so many years of weathering public criticism about her weight.

“I have been blamed and shamed,” she said elsewhere in that 2023 interview, “and I blamed and shamed myself.”

Now, on the eve of 2026, Winfrey says her mental shift is complete. “I came to understand that overeating doesn’t cause obesity. Obesity causes overeating,” she told the outlet. “And that’s the most mind-blowing, freeing thing I’ve experienced as an adult.”

She isn’t even sharing her current weight with the public.

Winfrey did take a break from the medication early in 2024, she said, and started to regain weight despite continuing to work out and eat healthy foods. So for Winfrey the obesity prescription will be renewed for a lifetime. C’est la vie seems to be her attitude.

“I’m not constantly punishing myself,” she said. “I hardly recognize the woman I’ve become. But she’s a happy woman.”

Winfrey has to take a carefully managed magnesium supplement and make sure she drinks enough water, she said. The shots are done weekly, except when she feels like she can go 10 or 12 days. But packing clothes for the Australian leg of her “Enough” book tour was an off-the-rack delight, not a trip down a shame spiral. She’s even totally into regular exercise.

Plus along with the “quiet strength” she has found in the absence of food noise, Winfrey has experienced another cool side effect: She pretty much couldn’t care less about drinking alcohol.

“I was a big fan of tequila. I literally had 17 shots one night,” she told People. “I haven’t had a drink in years. The fact that I no longer even have a desire for it is pretty amazing.”

So back to that croissant. How did she feel after she scarfed it down?

“I felt nothing,” she said. “The only thing I thought was, ‘I need to clean up these crumbs.’”