For me, the light bulb moment was the steak frites croissant. I was scrolling Instagram when the golden brown pastry popped onto my phone screen, a hunk of steak poking out from between its lifted layers and a few peppered fries sitting on a smear of sauce on top. I couldn’t look away, transfixed by this creation from Houston croissanterie Shakkar. I realized that savory croissants across the country had escaped all limits of tradition.

In the social media age, croissants have been the proving ground for viral food. The Cronut started it all, and then came the croissant cubes, the cruffin, the cereal, the Suprême, and so on. “We will never reach peak croissant,” the New York Times declared in 2023. And still, over the years, I, not a sweets person, have looked at the offerings at so many bakeries and found myself unsatisfied — despite the abundance of interestingly flavored, intricately topped sweet croissants, the savory ones still skewed a little snoozy.

Now, savory croissants seem to be taking up more of the pastry case and earning every square inch of their keep, with offerings that push not only the boundaries between cuisines but also the literal physical limits of croissant dough. Here come croissants covered in cheese and jumbo lump crab, like an extra-large crab rangoon, and croissants stuffed with kimchi and Spam. There are bacon, egg, and cheese ramen croissants — that’s three dishes in one, if you’re keeping track — and sausage-and-bean croissants and mushroom-and-short rib croissants. Let’s not forget the cronigiri. Has there ever been a better time to prefer savory pastries?

For Maham Qureshi, baker and co-founder of Shakkar, “sweet croissants are often about nostalgia and comfort.” Hers feature brown butter and cardamom or rose and pistachio. Savory croissants, meanwhile, “are where I get to tell stories,” Qureshi says. “Stories about generations before me.” Her savory croissants tend to draw on the “comfort and soul” of the richly spiced Pakistani food that she grew up with; some are basically meals, full of smoked brisket and Pakistani barbecue sauce, achaari chicken, and dum ka keema.

As the pool of pastry chefs diversifies nationally, we’re seeing more of this smashing together of cuisines as classic French technique becomes the starting point for more globally minded cooking: concha croissants in Los Angeles, longganisa croissants in Chicago, Afro Caribbean-inflected croissants in New York City. For bakers like Qureshi, who want to see their histories and cultures reflected in their food, laminated dough is a “beautiful blank canvas,” she says.

The growing interest in savory pastries can also burst apart some of those delineations between savory chefs and sweet ones. The recently opened Relic Bakery in San Diego serves pastries that include a honeynut squash croissant with balsamic and brown butter and a “biscuits and gravy” croissant topped with pork gravy and poached egg; its pastry case is about 60 percent sweet, 40 percent savory.

Before Relic, which started as a pop-up, chef and co-owner Derek Hadden worked mostly in fine dining and never in pastry. Accordingly, he thinks about pastries as he would a restaurant dish. “I started looking at produce that was in season and basically creating a dish that I would put on a plate, but manipulating in a way that it would work on a croissant,” he says. This usually means cutting back on fats — because croissant dough is already so buttery — and adding more acid to any toppings to cut through the richness.

Translating a savory dish into a croissant isn’t without its challenges. Early tests of a Reuben croissant with sauerkraut and dressing “just slopped,” Hadden says. A cassoulet croissant initially eluded him due to the inspiration’s soupy consistency. “The challenge there was: How can I thicken this without taking away flavor?” Hadden explains. He separated the brothy beans, pureed them, and then folded it into the other elements; it worked. “I try to put things on a pastry that you probably wouldn’t see on a pastry,” Hadden says.

The biggest hurdle is restraint, according to Qureshi. While more toppings might appeal to the social media crowd, they also risk compromising the structure and quality of the croissant itself. (Cue visions of soggy, underbaked bottoms.) “It’s all about breaking the dish down to what makes it craveable — the layers of flavor, texture, and balance — and then rebuilding it in a way that still respects the croissant,” she says.

If we’re to expand our scope slightly beyond croissants, we could say that bakers are breathing bold new life into savory pastries across the board. Dominique Ansel, inventor of the Cronut, has made somewhere between 700 and 800 flavors of Cronuts since it launched in 2013. “Every month is a new one and we’ve never, ever repeated flavors,” he says. And yet, Ansel has never made a savory Cronut.

“I want to keep the integrity and the status of the Cronut. It’s something sweet,” he says. Would it work? Maybe. “I don’t think we should. I think we should sometimes keep the croissant simple. It’s good, exploring. It can be interesting as well, but not for everything.”

Still, even Ansel is doing wild things with savory pastries lately. At his new bakery, Papa d’Amour, he takes a third-culture approach, drawing on his French background and his wife’s Taiwanese culture for creations like croissant bao with red bean butter and twists on shokupan toast. One of the bakery’s biggest hits so far is a spiral of laminated brioche dough that uses a similar technique to his croissants. It’s baked, filled with sticky rice cooked with aromatics and Shaoxing wine, topped with seared Japanese kurobuta hot dogs, glazed, and then flash-baked again.

Like much of this new wave of savory pastries, “it might sound strange — starch on starch, rice on bread — but it actually works very well together,” Ansel says.