The sweet hereafter

Bringing back the bakery

The Bakery on Cherry Street opened in something like 1974. Carl Brune is the brother of Caroline Brune, of the Enid Brunes, who opened the sweet shop with Cheryl Dobbins. At first, it was at Seventh and Main, relocated as The Bakery on Cherry Street when the building was slated for demolition. “Downtown,” said Carl, “it was simply known as The Bakery. The Alvin Plaza Hotel was across the street to the east and the famed nightspot, the Taj Mahal, was to the south,” he said. “All of it came down about the same time.”

“It was more like a doughnut shop,” said Susanne Barnard, who worked at the Bakery from 1987 to ’94, when it closed. “They started making croissants one day a week. And the line went out the door.”

The bakers of The Bakery on Cherry Street filled some of its croissants with fruit jams and others with Belgian chocolates. With any leftover dough, they made morning buns, what cinnamon toast would be if it had wings and could fly. Over the years, many have begged Barnard for the morning bun recipe, hoping to go home and stir up a batch.

“It’d be like physics,” she said, “how many times they rolled that belly of dough in one day. Then they’d do it again the next day. They had a sheeter, an automatic machine that would roll it and fold it, roll it and fold it. Even automated, it was still a pain in the ass.”

Carl kept the recipes after Caroline died in 2006—those, and the crates of the signature striped coffee cups, white with thin stripes, red or blue, like one of the blouses Picasso favored.

Last year, Brune decided to hand the recipes over to Molly Martin and Andrea Mohn of Antoinette Baking Company. “Two women, in business, making a go of it?” said Barnard. “Caroline would have been well pleased with that. I think I can speak for her.”

“None of her croissant recipes have directions on them,” said Martin, “and all she has on the card (for morning buns) are the dimensions of the sheeter. Nothing more.”

Thanks to the Bakery on Cherry Street, my life, if ever it flashes before my eyes, will do so on a cloud of baker’s yeast, roasted coffee and second-hand smoke.

Until the Bakery, I was only a regular at Furr’s, where my parents would haul us for Sunday lunch. But the Bakery bred regulars. A few of us grew up there, and a few more grew old.

One regular had his funeral procession roll by the Bakery, to pay homage or, perhaps, for a last unconscious whiff. Another, Woody Naifeh, held court there most days. In his signature gray cowboy hat—curled and worn at the edges, like Woody himself—he could have held down any diner from Alva to Vian.

I could kill an hour in the Bakery, reading Henry Mark’s column in Uptown News, nursing a morning bun and a cappuccino. Often, I killed housefuls. Sometimes I had money for either coffee or croissant but not both. I would take a book and a position. “You sat in the corner,” Susanne Barnard reminded me. I did, same as church, keeping everybody and everything in front of me.

Certain weekdays (too many to comfortably recount), I would leave only when the first of the lunch crowd began to appear. Most of my friends at least pretended to have jobs, and so I usually left the Bakery alone. On weekends, we’d regroup and fight for space at too few tables, huddle tightly, shout loudly to be heard, and smell like teen spirit on the way out the door.

Cafés beget revolutions, and we should probably have been protesting the shit going down in Bosnia, but, in those days before Kickstarter, the Serbs felt like a United Nations fight.

As with any addiction, there was withdrawal. The day the Bakery on Cherry Street announced it would bake no more, it did so with a one-paragraph “So long” slipped beneath the glass tabletops.

“What’s this?” said Bret, one of my Bakery brothers, walking in as I was walking out. What could I say? I left with a friend of mine, a Bakery barista that I’d fallen for. Later, sensing my losses, she brought me a souvenir: one of those coffee cups. It’s chipped. I still use it.

Bret moved to Seattle, land of cafes. More Bakery habitués left in that great Seattle migration—Louis, Jenny, Doug, Cynthia, Henry, Brannon, Jenny. I stayed, lost the girl, kept the mug.

That first Saturday when Antoinette rolled out the Bakery goods that did come with how-tos—sausage rolls, brownies, cinnamon rolls, a couple of cakes—I took my kids, promising them jam-filled croissants and cinnamon-sugared morning buns. But I’d jumped the gun. Of the Bakery recipes, there was an Italian cream cake left, and a “black and white” cheesecake, plus some bread loaves and several brownies. I ordered and took two or three bites of a very delicious cream cake that I don’t recall ever sampling in its Cherry Street incarnation.

We claimed a table near the front door. Antoinette was hopping, its windows sweating. Molly told me later they’d had a good day—twice the usual Saturday volume. “Almost all new customers,” she said. “They were excited but quick to add, ‘Well, that’s not what it used to look like. You got it wrong.’ ”

But there must have been something in the air. Susanne Barnard’s daughter, Camille, recently started working at Antoinette. Miraculously, maybe, she was on hand for the resurrection of the Bakery recipes, at least the ones written down, cracking whip and riding herd over what the French call levain sauvage—the “wild yeasts”—the fermenting spores inside the living dough so fruitful through time and trial that they infiltrate a café space and, unlike a café, never leave.