When I arrive at Georgetown Cupcake a few minutes after 1 a.m., a crew of six has just started setting the cupcake assembly line in motion. One person does nothing but mix batter. Another scoops the batter into large cupcake trays. Another watches the ovens, another makes frosting, and another two, once the first cupcakes come out and cool, will do nothing but frost. After this first batch, a gluten-free Chocolate Lava, they will continue baking cupcakes until around noon, having made batches of all 17 flavors offered in the Wednesday column of the Daily Cupcake Menu, an 8-by-8 card handed to each customer in line.
Two workers on the line this morning are Georgetown Cupcake's co-founders, sisters Katherine Kallinis and Sophie LaMontagne. Though they look very different—Katherine is a year and a half younger and several inches taller, with brown hair and angular features; Sophie is blond and has a rosy, round face—they speak in the same upbeat patter, bouncing off each other's thoughts and completing each other's sentences. "We were voted 'best couple' in high school," Kallinis quips. "Crazy, but it's true," says LaMontagne.
Georgetown Cupcake sells 10,000 cupcakes a day out of this store. Every day, there's a line of people stretching up the block, anywhere from a dozen to as many as 200, from when the store opens, at 10 a.m., until it closes, at 9 p.m.
Though they are just three years into the baking business, the sisters are now also television stars. Since last summer, they have been the main characters of DC Cupcakes, the first reality show all about daily life in the cupcake business. The second season has just begun airing, and they tirelessly do press, fanning the flames of America's cupcake obsession.
Kallinis and LaMontagne weren't supposed to have this life. They grew up outside of Toronto, and their parents, both immigrants from Greece, let the sisters know that they could be whatever they wanted when they grew up: a doctor or a lawyer. "At a very young age, it was made known to us that that should be our career path," says Kallinis.
Because the parents worked long hours, the sisters spent much of their time at their grandparents' house down the street. The grandmother, who had come from Greece, was one of the few housewives in the Kallinis family. While the other Kallinises were at their jobs, she would clean and cook and bake, and the two sisters would help her, learning her exacting standards in the kitchen. When their grandfather died, in 1996, and their grandmother grew sick, the two girls, then in high school, moved in to take care of her. She passed away three months later. For a long time, they both say, they had the same dream about her—that she was still alive, and they had neglected her.
LaMontagne went to Princeton and majored in molecular biology. Kallinis went to Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, and majored in political science, with the intention of going to law school. Both got jobs, LaMontagne at the venture firm Highland Capital and Kallinis ultimately as an event planner for Gucci in Toronto. But whenever they were home for the holidays, the two would reminisce and talk about someday starting a bakery, to carry on their grandmother's tradition.
They finally made their move on Mother's Day in 2007. The two sisters took their mother out to dinner in New York City and started talking again about the idea. "We were like, 'Let's just do it! What are we waiting for?' " LaMontagne says. Each said she would do it if the other was in. Their mother still thought they were joking. Then Kallinis called them both the following day to say she had just quit her job.
Nevertheless, no one in their family took their dream seriously. LaMontagne's husband dismissed it out of hand. "He thought the two of us just wanted to play bakery," LaMontagne says. So while he was away on a business trip, the sisters signed a $4,800-a-month lease for a tiny store on Potomac Street, just off M Street, in Georgetown.
Georgetown Cupcake opened on Valentine's Day in 2008, to immediate long lines. That was, in a way, a lucky break: They had put themselves at the nexus of the growing cupcake trend and another surefire money source: the throngs of dumb, procrastinating men looking to buy their way out of Valentine's Day. But the lines kept growing longer and longer.
I stop their story. "Why?" I ask. It's a little before 2 a.m., and the first batch of chocolate cupcakes is coming out of the oven. Katherine hands me one. I bite into it. It's slightly crusty on the outside, and the middle of the cupcake, still finishing baking in its own heat, is gooey. The chocolate flavor is deep and rich. And even though I spent the past day gorging on cupcakes, even though I went to bed on a second epic sugar crash and woke up two hours later hating cupcakes and myself, this unfrosted chocolate cupcake, newborn and naked, just washes away my and the whole cupcake craze's sins. Which makes me realize something. Even if this cupcake thing is a passing trend, a total fad, people are using it to create things that are good. Very, very good.
In November 2009, the sisters opened a second location, in Bethesda, Maryland. Because of growing demand from people outside of D.C., they built a bakery next to the Dulles airport. It bakes cupcakes that go immediately onto FedEx trucks to be shipped all over the U.S. overnight. (Customers pay a flat $26 in shipping on top of $29 per dozen cupcakes.) And that was how they won their family over. Their constant appearances in the press, the volume of work involved in running the business, and the exploding revenue the business was bringing in spoke louder than they could. LaMontagne's husband quit his job as a policy analyst and became Georgetown Cupcake's chief financial officer. The sisters' mom helps out, too. They had taken their grandmother's legacy out of the kitchen and into the world and turned it into a business.
Tray after tray of cupcakes comes out of the oven. By 5:30 a.m., a car arrives to take them to the airport. They have a TV appearance today in Los Angeles. They are thinking about building a store there, in Sprinkles's hometown.
When they walk out to the waiting car, 24 trays—some 1,080 cupcakes, or the amount that will be gobbled up in around an hour after the bakery opens later that morning—sit iced and perfect in the store's front two racks. Down the street, Sprinkles has been baking for a couple of hours. In the deceptively sweet world of cupcakes, competition never stops.
