Big Sur Bakery Cookbook - Michelle Wojtowicz [15]
Cut into 3-inch squares and serve.
Photographs by Sara Remington
Photographs by Sara Remington
April
Dinnertime
Honey
Profile: Jack, Beekeeper
Grilled Sardines with Frisée and Whole-Grain Mustard Dressing
Roasted Leg of Lamb with Pesto
Ruccola, Endive, and Radicchio Salad with Pine Nuts and Aged Goat Cheese
Braised Green Garlic, Roasted Spring Onions, and Grilled Ramps
Artichokes and Asparagus with Almonds and Grapefruit Dressing
Clovis’s Lime Tart with Lime Marmalade and Ginger Ice Cream
Photographs by Sara Remington
Dinnertime
If you stopped by the Bakery at breakfast and again at dinnertime, you could be forgiven for thinking that you’d walked into a different restaurant. In the evening, the casual neighborhood hangout is transformed into a real dining room: candles on the tables, wineglasses, and customers who have come to the Bakery as a treat.
We stay open between lunch and dinner, so throughout the afternoon there’s still a stream of passersby stopping in for coffee and any pastries left over from the morning. In the meantime, the servers polish glasses and silverware, fold napkins, replace old menus with new ones, set the tables, and nudge the coffee customers out of the dining room.
Late afternoon at the Bakery is a calm time, in both the front and the back of the house, since most of the chaos has happened between 9:00 and 3:00.
The night cooks come in to set up their stations and Phil puts some music on in the kitchen to give everyone something to listen to as they work. The pizza cook stokes the fire, tends the oven, and arranges more wood near the stove in the pizza room so it can dry. Mike reorganizes the wine room and puts together a wine list. Erik comes in to create the flower arrangement. It isn’t until around 5 o’clock that things start to heat up and pressure begins to build—the big show is coming.
Our reservation book gives us a general sense of how busy a night will be, but since we get a lot of walk-ins, we can never really predict what’s going to happen. When the evening kicks into gear, everyone goes on autopilot. No one talks much in the kitchen, except to explain special orders, which tend to be minimal since Phil doesn’t allow many changes to his menu. Our kitchen is so small that it requires a constant dance for people not to run into each other. Pizzas fly, and the pizza room gets hot—very hot. When the night is a good one, you can feel a buzz in the air—everyone totally in their groove, customers sometimes even sticking their heads into the kitchen to give their thanks.
We usually close the kitchen around 9:00 or 10:00, but it takes another hour or so to clean everything up. Once all the guests are gone, we sit at the bar to decompress. Phil challenges someone to a game of chess, or we share a bottle of wine. Eventually Phil locks up the restaurant and we all retreat home to our beds for some much-needed sleep. Five or so hours later, our morning bakers arrive to prepare the morning’s pastries, and the cycle begins again.
Photographs by Sara Remington
Photographs by Sara Remington
Honey
If you’d asked us a few years ago how honey was produced, we wouldn’t have been able to tell you much. But that was before we met Jack Koch, otherwise known as “Jack the Bee Guy.” He’s our resident honey expert, and he has taught us everything we know about bees.
Jack keeps his bees in Langstroth hives, which consist of white wooden boxes built without tops or bottoms that stack on top of one another to form a shaft. The bee colony lives in the bottom two boxes and builds the comb from the bottom up. The worker bees (which are all female) gather pollen and nectar from every plant they can—in Big Sur, they have access to a menu that includes huckleberry, dandelion, lupine, rosemary, fennel, and even poison oak. During spring bloom, when fruit trees start to flower, the bees have yet more choices, taking their pick of avocados, apples,