*This blog was first published on my website on June 11th*
I am too old to do what I do, but I cannot help myself.
On Saturdays and Sundays, I stand behind the service line at Bread Furst, to the back of the espresso machine. When a customer asks that his or her bread be sliced, I operate our rickety, noisy slicer, wait for it slowly to complete its cycle, and then put the sliced loaf in a paper bag.
I could be in the kitchen roasting red peppers or making a potato salad, or in the pastry kitchen scooping batter for muffins. I am not needed there though, and I am also not really needed behind the service line; but I am useful there as my being at the slicer allows all the service people to attend to customers, at all times.
But I am there because customers like to see me, the owner.
I wish I could more often deal directly with the customers. I try to, but to hear them I must stick my ear near their mouths. I am so hard of hearing, and even my super-duper hearing aids don’t help enough. I cannot ask customers constantly to repeat themselves – that irritates them and me too. I do walk about the line to the customer area to speak to one or another from time to time. Sometimes I even sit down with them and talk for a little while, which I always enjoy.
But most of the time I am behind the line operating the slicer, and that makes me feel like I am more of a relic than I am.
I was inspired to open Bread Furst, my third bakery, after my sister, Carla’s death in 2010. That may seem odd.
Carla, in 1984, had opened a little bookstore in a commercial block of Connecticut Avenue. It wasn’t a remarkable block. It had a small neighborhood grocery, some nail salons, a liquor store, and a good drug store.
It was a big risk for her. She had worked in the Carter Administration and lost her job when Reagan was elected. She formed a group she called “Workseekers,” and encouraged all its members to imagine what work they would most like to do. Carla’s fantasy was to open a small bookstore. The problem with that choice was that everyone believed that bookselling had become nationalized by Borders and Barnes and Noble, and that there was no hope that small stores could survive.
But Politics and Prose did survive.
Carla was smart, opinionated, passionate, loud, bossy, an original force in the neighborhood just as she had been in our family. For example, a few years after she opened P&P, she acknowledged that she had opened her bookstore on the wrong side of the street. So she organized her customers to carry books across Connecticut Avenue to the new space she had rented. She gave us all t-shirts that said “Why does the bookstore cross the street?”
Police officers arrived spontaneously to stand in the middle of Connecticut Avenue to protect us.
Carla did so much for this city. Her service originality made P & P a neighborhood fixture.
Her bookstore revived small bookstores in the city. Her achievement in Washington encouraged others in other cities to open small bookstores. She was recognized by booksellers everywhere as someone who had innovated and inspired others to do so.
But in 2010 Carla died of a terrible cancer, a kind no one ever survives. Her siblings thought about her every day; she had been our older sister. Perhaps I thought about her especially as Politics and Prose was in my life all the time, just as my brother-in-law was in my life all the time.
I cannot even now fully understand how I began to think that opening a bakery again in her neighborhood would be a tribute to Carla. That seems odd, doesn’t it?
Why couldn’t I do that? That would be a fitting memorial to Carla, I thought. But bakeries? I had already opened my first bakery, Marvelous Market in 1990 followed by The BreadLine in 1997. Did I really want to do it again, and at my age?
It’s now been more than eleven years since Bread Furst opened. But I still think about those opening days in 2014.
I was very anxious. I was 76 years old then, far too old to begin a business, too old really to do anything other than to retire. But there I was, opening a neighborhood bakery, a big risk for someone of my age, a risk for someone of any age. My sons were nervous, but I didn’t share the same anxieties as they did. I was too much of an optimist to think that I could fail.
I arrived at the bakery on April 6, 2014, the opening day, two hours early. It was still night. I parked my car behind the bakery, and when I climbed out, I smelled the strong smell of Alan Benton’s bacon perfuming the entire neighborhood.
I went through the back door and passed the pastry kitchen, and then into the office to change into my whites.
I really had nothing to do at the bakery at that hour, but I was too anxious to be in bed, to be in my home. And with nothing to do, I made trouble for everyone who did have things to do.
I snapped at the new manager who had put a shelf of potato chips near the cash registers: “Is that really what we want our customers to see when they arrive for the first time – potato chips?” I moved the shelf to one side where customers would not see it.
Some marketing! Some management!
The staff didn’t know their jobs. They couldn’t know their jobs. Much of what they had to do in a bakery, they had not done before. There would be mistakes; there were mistakes. The job of food service is repetitious, and it takes some practice to learn how to streamline the moves. We had only started to learn then.
For nearly six months before the opening, I had written a blog every few days to describe the opening process – raising money, buying equipment, getting consent from the city about our plumbing, persuading Pepco, our electric company, to upgrade our electricity by 1,000 percent. I felt confident that the neighborhood would notice our opening. But we put a big sign outside – just in case.
Customers did come on that first day. Not so many. A few hundred. They bought bread, cookies, a few pies; and some of them bought savory foods for their dinners. We had a large case filled with cheeses and charcuterie that I planned to cut to order. That was a terrible idea, too slow, too labor intensive.
I learned during the first week that the coffee station that I had wanted at the center of the line was going to be a bottleneck, customers waiting at the center of the service line to receive their espresso drinks, blocking other customers who didn’t want espresso drinks.
Of course there were other bad ideas, other mistakes. That’s the nature of starting a business. You try out things and discard them quickly if they don’t work.
There were no great bakeries in Washington then. There weren’t even then very good bakeries. Perhaps by following Carla’s example I could encourage others to open other bakeries here.
That’s what I did. We opened Bread Furst in 2014. It’s been a great success, and others have followed, if not been replicated in the city as fast as I had hoped.
In 2017, Jonathan Bethony and his wife, Jessica Azeez, opened Selou Bakery in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington. They had come to see me in 2016 to talk about their plans. Johnathan was working at the University of Washington; and they wanted to be in our Washington. I was excited for them and for the city, but I was fearful as well. Johnathan is a purist baker who mills his own grains and works with a Spanish woodfired oven that I considered a fad.
I also didn’t like very much the neighborhood he and Jessica had chosen. But they worked and worked and made their bakery a success.
Then later came Boulangerie Christophe in Georgetown, and then Manifest in Riverdale, Maryland, north of Washington.
Every week, at least once a week, a customer says to me, “Why don’t you open in Chevy Chase?” I am able to retrain myself and not say, “Huh, we are basically in Chevy Chase,” as I wonder how much trouble it is for people to get into their cars, and drive one mile from Chevy Chase to us and how much trouble it would be for me to open a new branch of Bread Furst and how much I remember how I hated the expansion that drove me into bankruptcy with my first bakery.
Instead I say to that customer, “Look at me. I am 87 years old. Do you think that I want to spend the last years of my life opening bakeries, especially since I am so happy with what we have been able to do right here.”
I am happy. This is a wonderful place. We can sell everything we can make. We cannot make more than we now do. We are busier and busier. The neighborhood loves us. Their children love us. What more could I ask?
Fantastic post. Thank you! Great turns of phrase, too.
Such an inspirational heartfelt post. The sweetness of your words mirror the amazing landmark you have created. Love Bread Furst.