​A man carries a large tray of pastries on his head on a street near Franso Hariri Stadium during a football match in Erbil, Iraq’s Kurdistan region, on May 2, 2026. Erbil SC defeated Al-Karkh SC 1-0 during an Iraq Stars League match at Franso Hariri Stadium, a victory that moves Erbil closer to the top of the league table, in front of 25,000 fans. (Photo by Sabur Rashid / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images) I gotta be honest with y’all. There was a day last summer that I would have picked the apple pie croissant from Butter and Crumble over the San Francisco 49ers winning the Super Bowl.In fact, I got up at 6 AM, stood in line for hours, got the last one, and then had to carefully transport my hot, flaky treasure from San Francisco to Sunnyvale by train, scooter, and car. Ninety minutes later, I breathed a sigh of relief when I arrived at my parents’ front door with the apple pie croissant intact. I opened it and walked in to the sound of my mom throwing up. She had good days and bad days when it came to keeping food down, and the day before was the rare good day. I so badly wanted her to keep the streak going, so she could try this mash-up of her two favorite foods. Her cancer made sure that she never had a good day again. She was gone by October. I’ve written before about how she fell in love with the 49ers shortly before I was born, a consequence of her moving to the Bay Area during Steve Young’s prime. My first conscious memory was waking up from a nap because my parents were losing their minds when Terrell Owens caught The Catch II. This will be my first full season without her. My mom and I bickered a lot when I was younger. 49ers football was our sanctuary. The game would come on, and instead of yelling at each other, we yelled together at the TV. Whatever we were arguing about would shrink down to something so insignificant that we found our way back to each other. Football was her love language, often reconciling an argument by randomly bringing up something she heard on sports radio that morning. Her other love language was food. Butter and Crumble opened up a few blocks from my apartment in 2023, and that became our local bakery. It opened our eyes to a new type of pastry — not the traditional croissants you can get at an Arsicault but something more new-age, more Shanahan-esque: chimichurri short rib croissants, eggplant parm danishes, chorizo tater tot cro-quiches, banana foster bread pudding. Every month’s menu reveal kept us on our toes. We started seeking out what we called a “WTF is That” pastry whenever we traveled to a new city. It evolved from my designated role on family trips: the food-finder who had to scour Reddit threads, Instagram pages, and Google reviews to figure out where to eat in a city none of us had been to before. Where’s that town’s version of Butter and Crumble, churning out flavor combinations in their carby monstrosities that would offend the purists?The only thing less realis