Yesterday's Bread

I have picked up an odd habit lately. I watch YouTube videos made by travelers who spend a few days on Guam and then tell their viewers what they thought. I want to see the island the way a visitor sees it, and these strangers with handheld cameras tend to be more candid than any survey.

After a while the videos blur together. Then a Korean creator who goes by HYUNJIN posted one called Four Nights, Five Days in Guam.¹ The best thing she ate on the trip, she says, was an almond croissant from a small bakery in Tumon.

I knew the place. My family goes there too, although we would vote for the maple pecan bagel, a seasonal item we miss every time it leaves the counter. What struck me was that it didn't come from a resort dining room or a brochure. It came from a neighborhood bakery.

I learned later that the almond croissant started out as a way not to waste bread. French bakers would take the croissants that hadn't sold the day before, fill them with almond cream, scatter almonds on top, and bake them again to sell the next morning.² Day-old bread, given a second chance, and better for it.

Koreans have a word for the calculation HYUNJIN was making: gasungbi, the price-to-value ratio. About a decade ago Kim Nan-do, a consumer-trends scholar at Seoul National University, predicted in Trend Korea that value for money would take over the role brand names once played for shoppers there.³ They will happily pay for something they think is worth it. They just won't pay extra for something ordinary.

That explains a scene I see in a surprising number of these videos. The traveler spends the day at the beach, and dinner is a cup of instant noodles back at the hotel. Some people take that as thrift. I think it's something else. A Korean travel agency's guide to Guam warns readers that prices here run about 20 to 30 per cent above what they pay at home.⁴ If dinner is going to cost more than it would in Seoul and taste no better, the noodles make sense. Yet the same traveler will gladly pay for a croissant good enough to become the highlight of the trip. The problem was never the price alone. It was paying more without getting more.

So there are two things Guam can work on. It can make the food better, and it can make it cost less.

On making the food better, I keep coming back to the Michelin Guide, which rates restaurants in travel terms. One star is worth a stop, two are worth a detour, and three are worth a special journey.⁵ When I wrote earlier this year that Guam needed a dish worth flying back for,⁶ a special journey was what I had in mind. The stars have surprisingly little to do with luxury. Inspectors look at the ingredients, the flavors, the technique, the cook's personality, and whether the food is as good the next time. The guide says the stars are for what's on the plate and nothing else,⁷ so a roadside stand could earn one. What would stop it is a dish that's wonderful on Sunday and ordinary on Tuesday.

I would like every chef, baker, and cook on the island to work as though a Michelin inspector might be next in line. That means tasting the food every morning, the red rice and the croissants alike, and adjusting a family recipe instead of merely repeating it.

I also don't think Guam should be shy about asking for help. Lee Won-il is a chef many Koreans know from Please Take Care of My Refrigerator. In September he started hosting Taste Guru 211, in which he visits well-known Korean restaurants and says frankly what he thinks.⁸ The Guam Visitors Bureau already works with Korean media partners such as SBS Medianet.⁹ It could invite him and his crew for a week. They could eat everywhere from fiesta tables to Tumon's hotel kitchens and tell each cook honestly what's working. Our cooks would hear from someone who knows what Korean diners want, and his viewers would watch someone they trust discover the island's food.

Good advice fades, though, unless someone writes it down. In Naples, pizza makers from old family pizzerias formed an association in 1984 and wrote their own rules for true Neapolitan pizza.¹⁰ Island cooks could do the same for a handful of local dishes. Guam Community College, with its renovated culinary arts center, seems a natural place to work them out.¹¹ The recipes should come from the island's own cooks and families. A standard should set a minimum for quality, not replace every family's version of a dish. A visiting chef can help with technique. What the food should be is for the people of Guam to decide.

Making the food cheaper is where the government comes in. Guam's business privilege tax is charged on a business's gross receipts,¹² and on food it ends up in both the grocery bill and the restaurant check. On October 1 the rate went down from four and a half per cent to four, a number both the Legislature and the governor accepted.¹³ I'm glad, but I would go further on food.

There is already a bill to start from. In February 2025 Senator William Parkinson introduced Bill 71-38, which would suspend the tax on food, including groceries and food that businesses buy to prepare and sell.¹⁴ I would ask senators to consider a narrower version: no business privilege tax on unprepared food, whether it's a family in Dededo buying it or a kitchen in Tumon.

I should not oversell this. Sales by licensed wholesalers are already exempt,¹² and the tax on a restaurant meal would stay. Food is typically 28 to 35 per cent of a restaurant's sales,¹⁵ so a kitchen that buys at the grocery store might save a little over one per cent a plate. That won't close a 20 or 30 per cent gap. The real benefit is at the register, where every family would feel it.

The savings also have to reach the shelf. When Germany cut its value-added tax in 2020, supermarkets passed nearly all of it on to shoppers, and passed on more where competition was stronger.¹⁶ Guam's grocery market is much smaller than Germany's, and competition may do less of the work, so I would add three safeguards. Show the tax on every receipt. Have the Bureau of Statistics and Plans, which already tracks island prices,¹⁷ survey staple food prices before and after. And set a review date, so the Legislature can take the exemption back if prices don't fall.

The obvious objection is money, and it's a fair one. The tax is a significant source of government revenue,¹⁴ and the governor's original 2027 budget bill, written at the higher rate, counted on about $363 million from it.¹⁸ Any exemption would need an honest cost estimate and a plan to cover it. But we are already paying for things as they are. Guam had 688,599 visitors in fiscal year 2026, 5.6 per cent fewer than the year before. Arrivals from Korea, still our largest market, fell almost 16 per cent, and in September they were down by half, to 13,175 from 27,184 a year earlier.¹⁹ When an island depends this much on visitors, a tax that makes its food look like a poor deal is hard to defend.

I keep thinking about those day-old croissants, and the baker who decided that what was left on the shelf could be made better instead of thrown away. In a year as hard as this one has been for Guam, I find that encouraging.

I was raised to believe that doing good work is a way of caring for the people we serve, and that charging them fairly is part of that care. Most of the time nobody notices that kind of work. Every so often, someone does.