Big Sur Bakery Cookbook - Michelle Wojtowicz [3]
As we kept working on the Bakery, we got to know Terry’s friends, many of whom we now consider friends of our own. The first person we met—in fact, he stopped by the restaurant on our very first trip up to Big Sur—was Wayne Hyland, a local fisherman, forager, and hunter. And the list has grown since then. There’s Forrest, a former commercial fisherman who takes us poke poling for rockfish and helps us split wood for the fireplace. There’s Jack the Bee Guy, a machinist and longtime resident who treats us to some of his stash of his local Big Sur honey. A few of our friends are former or current employees, like Eric, a farmer and waiter who now runs a microgreen business with his girlfriend, Jasmine. Marilyn Epp, a former Air Force linguist, started off as our bookkeeper and now is one of Michelle’s best friends. Over the years we’ve also gotten to know our local producers, like Jamie at Serendipity Farms in Carmel, who supplies us with organic vegetables. And thanks to Justin Severino, who worked our pizza station and now makes a living as a butcher, we met Jim Dunlop of TLC Ranch, who provides us with pork and pasture-raised eggs.
In those early days, we also had a parade of locals coming into the restaurant to give us suggestions and remind us that no restaurant had ever survived at our spot. But we managed to make it through that first summer, and at the end of the season, we sat down with Mike to have a powwow about where we wanted the restaurant to go. We decided that if we were going to stay in Big Sur, we had to raise the bar and turn the restaurant into a place where we could serve the kind of food we’d been trained to cook, the kind of food we felt passionate about. So we closed the Bakery for eight weeks and completely revamped it. At that point, we’d just met Erik Seniska, a brilliant artist and designer who’s now in charge of everything artistic in the Bakery, and we gave him free reign to reinvent the Bakery’s décor. We also switched to serving pastries and coffee during the day, pre-made sandwiches for lunch, and a more upscale dinner menu at night. We lit candles, changed the evening music, and bought wineglasses. Two months and several thousand dollars of debt later, we reopened.
The local response was mixed. We’d developed a following by that point, and some of our regular customers were none too pleased to see wineglasses on the tables and increased prices on the menu. But Phil stuck to his guns and insisted that we needed to cook food that we could be proud of, the kind of food we were taught to make by our teachers at the CIA and by our mentors in Los Angeles. That food required good ingredients, those ingredients cost more, and as a result, we needed to raise our prices. We began working on perfecting our chicken and mashed potatoes, figuring out ways to make fantastic burgers and soups, and devising a pizza that could rival those we grew up with in New Jersey. Eventually, the burger moved to our brunch menu to make room for grilled steaks and fish, the vegetable side category grew, and we began running daily specials. Instead of assigning each entree a specific vegetable side dish, we gave customers the option to choose their own, creating a touch of individuality that we loved.
Through the process, we had a constant desire to expand and grow, to make the Bakery into a restaurant we could be truly proud of. And this process hasn’t stopped. Recently a chef friend asked Phil if, after seven years of running the Bakery, he felt he was still learning. After thinking about it for a moment, Phil realized that learning is all we do. It’s a constant, unending process—and luckily, we love it.
It’s good, too, to feel our work is paying off. Our location and the Bakery’s unassuming