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It’s been 55 minutes since a customer set foot inside Pasticceria Natalina. Something’s wrong with this picture. It’s Saturday afternoon on foot-traffic-heavy Clark Street in Andersonville, two weeks before Christmas, and many consider this the finest pastry shop in Chicago.

“The line should be out the door,” says its chef/co-owner, Natalie Zarzour, sporting a buzz cut like Demi Moore’s in “G.I. Jane.”

A woman in her 40s walks in, checks out the display case housing lemon custard tarts and buttery loaves of panettone. She turns around and walks out. Length of visit: 20 seconds.

“Voting is something that happens every day with every dollar you spend,” said Zarzour, 28, born in Palos Heights. “Wherever it’s not getting spent, the public is voting the place out. Chicago voted no (on me), and I’m at peace with that. If you don’t want something that’s clean and nutritious and pure, what else can I say? You guys don’t deserve it.”

There used to be press clippings hung on the back wall, lauding the Sicilian pastry shop with enough praise to fill three more. Some months ago, Zarzour took them all down. She replaced them with a quote she found in a Charlie Trotter dessert cookbook from German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: “To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”

Pastry shops have earned their happy aura via sugar and butter, the idea that desserts are, by definition, a satisfying coda. Pasticceria Natalina (5406 N. Clark St.), which will be 4 years old on Valentine’s Day, balances stubbornly uncompromising quality with a reputation for being, as some customers describe it, “a rip-off,” “rude” and “highway robbery.”

It wasn’t always the case. There was a time customers streamed out the door on Saturdays, back when cannoli, the shop’s signature pastry, sold for $4 apiece and were hand-filled with ricotta to order. The first few years, four out of five customers who walked into her shop emerged with pastries in hand. She and husband/business partner Nick Zarzour lived in the kitchen, spending Christmas sleeping on yoga mats to keep pace with orders.

“My partner’s family is Sicilian,” says Dan McCauley, owner of Taste of Heaven cafe across the street. “When I’ve purchased them gifts from Natalie’s place, on occasion they have literally gotten tears in their eyes in response to the authenticity of her work.”

So to understand why customers disappeared, why she entered a self-described period of rage, why the cannoli now costs $9, why the Zarzours will close the shop when their lease runs out in September and how Natalie Zarzour became Chicago’s most provocative pastry chef in a profession with little provocation, just ask her about the “Lobster Tail.”

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It’s not an actual lobster tail, but coda d’aragosta, the Neapolitan dessert that resembles its namesake, with a flaky, many-layered shell and a custard-based filling (cousin to the better-known sfogliatelle).

After the shop opened, customers asked for a coda d’aragosta. Zarzour took learning to make one as a challenge, one that would take a while to master. In the interim, she cheated — she ordered frozen, factory-made versions, basting them in the oven with her most expensive butter.

“What we produced was something people went insane for, but they’re all coming out of the same five factories in New York,” Zarzour says. “I took an industrial piece of (expletive) and played the illusion game.”

When she nailed her from-scratch recipe a year later, she got rid of the factory version. The price doubled to $12 from $6 apiece. Sales took a nose dive, and some stated a preference for the old version.

To Zarzour, the ordeal signaled that she was in a business in which stores undercut each other to survive. The public had become accustomed to a price point that was unsustainable without cutting corners. What was sacrificed, she is convinced, were natural ingredients. (She admits to having been “profoundly ignorant” to serve the factory-made products.)

So began a streak of activist baking, a topic that quickens her speech and raises her volume. On the radicalism scale, she resides somewhere left of Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, equating corn syrup to poison in the literal sense. “It’s the most democratic form of natural selection,” she says. “Industrial food is going to kill the stupid people.”

Still, many of Zarzour’s charges against the baking industry are validated by a woman considered the city’s pre-eminent pastry chef, Gale Gand.

“It’s not that far off from the truth,” says Gand, executive pastry chef at Tru and a former Food Network host. “We’ve trained a generation or two that artificial flavors taste right. I can’t go into the bakery business because of it.”

Zarzour’s ingredients-first, price-later approach was morally righteous, but it put the squeeze on business. She began her career as the type to call customers “darling,” comfortable enough to place her hand on their shoulders and keep it there. But two years in, customers were jumping ship as the economy began its free fall. She believes they were allowing themselves to be bamboozled by inferior products for the sake of saving a few dollars.

“She always looked on the brighter side, always the optimistic one,” said Nick Zarzour, her husband of eight years. “But optimism turned to frustration. Frustration turned to anger.”

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She snapped at customers who didn’t get it. Something as innocuous as “Are these pastries fresh?”: Zarzour responded internally, “No, (expletive), it’s stale, get the (expletive) out.” It would emerge from her lips as something less vulgar but equally curt.

“Why are these so expensive?”: Zarzour got sick of hearing that one. The question wasn’t why her pastries are so expensive, she’d say, but why the rest of the baking industry was so cheap.

“You go through all the reasons why that other cannoli is $2. When people find out they were misled, the defensiveness and anger comes out,” Zarzour said. “They’d say, ‘Those cannoli at that bakery are awesome, and you can’t tell me they’re not.’”

Her favorite is being labeled a “child hater” because she and her husband have the audacity to tell parents to control their kids while in the store.

All along, Zarzour is steadfast — to a fault — that she’s on the side of truth and others just aren’t seeing the light. She never planned to run the business beyond five years anyway, and she and Nick are not planning to have kids, so there’s an independent streak that affords her the right to speak freely.

The filter between her mind and mouth is porous. She mentions, for instance, taking sex breaks with her husband in the store bathroom.

Yet, it never comes off as shock for shock’s sake, but matter of fact, because her philosophy is unvarnished truth over politically correct sugarcoating.

In Twitter, Zarzour found her ideal public outlet — spontaneous and unedited.

March 24: @inourownhands: “Chicago, somebody needs to love you enough to tell you the truth: You’re just too easily impressed, and even easier to fool.”

May 1: “What passes for a decent shot of espresso in Chicago is usually so horrendous I’d rather drink my own (urine).”

When Sarah Levy of Sarah’s Pastries and Candies published her cookbook last year, Zarzour sent out a tweet calling her “an embarrassment to our profession” and someone “who bakes at the proficiency level of a soccer mom.” (Levy’s response: “I’m sorry to hear that she feels that way.”) Zarzour was denounced by online commenters and, the next morning, found vandals had torn out her outdoor plants and smeared ketchup on the window with a feminine napkin.

The irony is that she sees the recent slowdown in business as a hidden blessing. Fewer customers means more sleep, and a rested Zarzour is a happier, less negative person. Her clients who come in now are “better-quality customers,” she says.

She and her husband claim the shop is breaking even, a smaller clientele covering costs by paying more (on average, prices have tripled since the shop opened). Regardless, they are going to close. She wants to take a year off to travel and rest her body — heal the carpal tunnel in her forearms, as well as neck and back pain. They’ll most likely spend time in Lebanon, where Nick’s family resides.

Reaction to the shop’s closing is mixed: There are those who won’t miss (as one online commenter noted) her “borderline-insane, circular rants,” and those, in greater numbers, who bemoan the loss of a pastry shop that might have stood a chance in an earlier generation, in a different place.

“It’s a loss for the city of Chicago, for sure,” says Giuseppe Tentori, the Italian-born chef at Boka and friend to the Zarzours. “You don’t need to go to Sicily to get that kind of dessert.”

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Another half hour has passed since the woman in her 40s walked in and out of the shop. No customers since. Over loudspeakers, gangsta rap plays on a loop — there’s a strict No Christmas Music policy at Pasticceria Natalina.

Zarzour says, “The public doesn’t understand that I’m the one who loves them.”

“Those people who run the bakeries that pump the public with corn syrup and Crisco and chemicals, those are the business owners who they see as their friend because they make things available to them at the price they want to see. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have to show tough love to the people they truly love the most.”

kpang@tribune.com