“Who wants a hot croissant?” asked the actor Mario Cantone, reprising his character Anthony Marentino from the HBO show “Sex and the City.”
Mr. Cantone, brandishing an apron and a cake server, added an emphasis on the word “hot” and wagged his eyebrows, turning the otherwise ordinary tray of freshly baked pastries into an innuendo.
A group of fans in front of him — most of whom were women with their phones at the ready — giggled and took photos.
When “Sex and the City” was brought back to life in 2021 as “And Just Like That …,” Mr. Cantone’s character pivoted from a career in wedding planning to starting up a bread delivery business, called Hot Fellas. As the name suggests, his business is staffed by sexy men in short denim rompers so tight that every arm flex or squat teases a wardrobe malfunction.
The fictional business became “a fan favorite story line from the moment it first appeared,” Dana Flax, a marketing vice president at HBO Max said in an emailed statement, citing the engagement and enthusiasm for the Hot Fellas on social media.
In the most recent episode of Season 3, which was released last week, Anthony opened a Hot Fellas brick-and-mortar cafe (using a pun for male genitalia to alter that phrase) and his current lover, Giuseppe, an aspiring poet played by Sebastiano Pigazzi, temporarily became a Hot Fella to help with its launch — thanks largely to his ability to fill out the skin-tight uniform.
Over the weekend, that fictional cafe spilled into reality when Librae Bakery in downtown Manhattan was transformed into Hot Fellas, festooned with fictional branding, baguette-shaped light sconces sourced straight from the set and signage with quotes from the show, like, “He made my sourdough rise in the workplace.”
Three Hot Fellas from the show, in their uniforms, mingled with fans — flexing their arms and posing for selfies to a chorus of flirty shrieks. It had, in other words, all the hallmarks of an event primed for social media to market a show that, almost three decades after the original aired, is trying to resonate with new audiences.
On the first day of the pop up, Mr. Cantone and Mr. Pigazzi got behind the counter to box up pastries for the fans standing in a line that snaked up the block. At one point, Mr. Cantone strolled into the kitchen and started rolling croissants — a task that came somewhat naturally to him, he said in an interview.
“Every night, I cook for my husband,” he said. “I love food. I always say to the ladies, and the men, too — if you’re out on a date and you’re eating incredible food and you are just making yummy sounds and moaning, and just the passion that you feel for this food that you’re eating is so expressed, and your date is just going, ‘Mmm this is good.’ Don’t go home with them. It will be a dead experience, because food and sex is — it’s all the same stuff.”
When Mr. Pigazzi, standing nearby, was asked if he wore any prosthetics to fill out his uniform, he smirked and replied, “Only my hair dresser knows for sure.”
The timing of the pop up was planned to coincide with the opening of the Hot Fellas cafe on the show, said Rebecca Newman, the culinary director of Librae Bakery, who wore big croissant earrings and a hair clip that looked like a stick of butter. It took the studio and the bakery roughly a year of coordination to make that work. They prepared “over a thousand” pieces of pastries, Ms. Newman said, and ran out of them on both days.
The crowd had a mix of fans who were relatively new to the reboot and those who had been with Carrie and her friends since the beginning.
Jess Gearan, 25, first started watching “Sex and the City” about four years ago with her roommate Allyson Hawkins. Like other Gen Zers who have recently discovered the show, Ms. Gearan embraced the protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw, and her crew, even if their lives felt far removed from her own.
“We watch it all the time, like when we’re cooking and on the weekend,” Ms. Gearan said.
“Obviously, it’s different from the New York dating scene now, but I think there are good pieces to take from it, like your girlfriends are your soulmates,” Ms. Hawkins said.
The reboot of the show had had some awkward attempts at evolving with the mores of modern culture, but Maddie Lane, 26, who had started watching the show when she was in high school, said she found it fun to see the original characters enter “the world that we live in now.”
As they waited in line, women from the show’s original fan base recounted how they had navigated their early dating lives while watching “Sex and the City” and how they resonated today with the matured versions of the characters and their new friends.
“I have had a lot of life events in New York City — I’ve been married, divorced and a second marriage — a lot of different things that I can relate to with all of the characters,” said Holly Brown, 48, an artist and private school art teacher. She met her current husband, who is from the Netherlands, on OkCupid in 2015. “I told him, ‘Well, if you want to go out, you’ve got to fly to New York and take me to dinner,’” she said. “And he did — we had our first kiss in a taxi, our first face-to-face meeting was at Port Authority. It’s such a ‘Sex and the City’ episode.”
Rachna Kalia, 48, was visiting New York from London when she found out about the pop up. “‘Sex and the City’ has been part of my story for like, 25 years. So to actually be part of a tiny bit of it? It’s amazing,” she said. As a single, child-free woman, she connects with the reboot’s new character Seema Patel, who is played by Sarita Choudhury. “I get her completely,” Ms. Kalia said.
Nearby, a mother and daughter from Australia took photos with the Hot Fellas. Carrie McLeod, 47, is such a big fan of the original show that she named her daughter Charlotte, after the character Charlotte York. During their trip, Carrie and Charlotte, 19, took the “Sex and the City” New York tour, hitting all the well-known stops from the series.
When it started to rain, the fans in line took out their umbrellas and raincoats, determined to catch a glimpse of Mr. Cantone and Mr. Pigazzi, and grab free pastries. The Hot Fellas circulated to keep spirits up, handing out cookies to those at the back of the line.
Gaspare Asaro, 84, who was dressed in a full suit and tie and was headed to his grandson’s baptism at a church nearby, stopped to take a picture of the crowd outside the cafe.
“I saw this mass of people, so I asked a girl, ‘What is going on?’ Maybe it’s a celebrity over here or they’re just waiting for the food?” he said. “That is life in New York.”
When asked if he had heard of the show, he shook his head and walked on.
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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