In 2014, ex-Bon Appétit editor Andrew Knowlton predicted that “the kolache craze” would soon take the food world by storm and that it would quickly swoop past the cronut’s place as indelible pastry phenomena. He wasn’t the first to bank big on the fist-sized buns, a Texas-fried take on a Czech dessert dish called kolach. In 2009, a consortium of Houston investors announced plans to open no fewer than 50 locations of a chain called Kolache Mama in cities across the country, starting right outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. Despite allegedly attracting the patronage of Henry Kissinger, the prospective chain would not outlive the ghoulish, pastry-eating war criminal and instead shuttered a year later.