Big Sur Bakery Cookbook - Michelle Wojtowicz [4]
When we were offered a chance to write a cookbook based on the Bakery, it took a while to decide how to structure it. Yes, Big Sur is one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever seen, but most articles and books about Big Sur give an overly glossy sense of what life here is like. They don’t mention that there’s only one power line connecting us to Carmel, and when that gets knocked out, we can lose electricity for hours—or days. They don’t mention that in the rainy winter season, our business slows to a trickle, our bank accounts run down, and we struggle to make it through to the next summer. They don’t mention that Big Sur’s wildlife, a draw for many tourists, can also pose a danger, like when a huge mountain lion started eating our neighbors’ dogs. And, most importantly, they don’t give a sense of the people who actually live here—the eclectic, eccentric community we’ve come to know and love.
So we decided to keep a journal of twelve months here in Big Sur, starting with March, which marks the beginning of spring and a new year of produce. We also included profiles of some of the friends and community members who have shaped our experience here, not to mention our food. We wanted a way to acknowledge and thank them for all they have done to make the Bakery what it is today.
As for us, we’re proud of our lives here in Big Sur. We’ve taken an abandoned, failed restaurant next to a gas station and turned it into a place that people remember and want to revisit. We’re running our own business. We’re cooking what we want to. We’re working together as partners and have found our places in a community that feels like family. And though it can be difficult to keep all this in mind when business is bad or the electricity is out or small-town life feels suffocating, we’re living our dream in one of the most beautiful places in the world. As Terry and Rachel would be happy to remind us, what more, really, could we ask for?
Photographs by Sara Remington
Photographs by Sara Remington
Our Philosophy
If you ask us to describe the type of cooking we do, we always come up with the same three terms: “restore,” “mom and pop,” and “meat and potatoes.”
“Restore” because that’s where the word “restaurant” comes from, and it’s how we like to think of what we do here at the Bakery: people come in, hungry after a long day, and we restore them with our food. That’s what this building has been used for since it was built in 1936, and we like to think that we’re keeping up that tradition, but raising the bar.
“Mom and Pop” are, of course, us. We love owning our own place, staking our claim out here on the California coast and taking care of the people who come through our doors. But we’re a new generation of mom and pop—cooking with fire, using fresh seasonal ingredients, and serving food that’s good not just for the people who eat it, but also for the community that provided it and the land from which it came.
Photographs by Sara Remington
“Meat and potatoes” refers to the food itself. But our overarching goal is to serve simple, rustic food made with the freshest, highest-quality ingredients possible—down to earth, but kicked up a notch. We make everything we can from scratch—no processed foods here—and choose preparation methods that highlight foods’ natural flavors without overwhelming them. We might be gourmands ourselves, with years of culinary training