The Cookie Crumbles : Renaissance Bakery Is Leaving Sweet Memories After 60 Years as Laguna Landmark
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When the news spread Saturday that the landmark Renaissance Bakery in Laguna Beach was closing forever, some customers talked about chaining themselves to the tables.
But no matter what their customers do, the bakery’s owners say the doors of the local hangout will close today at 5:30 p.m.
“I didn’t know it would be such a big deal,” said Helen Valsamakis, who has owned the bakery with her mother, Marina Valsamakis, for 12 years. “I’ve been overwhelmed with people who feel a genuine loss, real sorrow,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”
Not only has the bakery sold wedding and birthday cakes to generations of the same local families, it has been a place where the town gathered, where residents lobbied their council members and where singles went to meet.
Valsamakis said litigation prevented her from explaining the decision to close.
Customers speculated Saturday that rent increases in the tourist area must have forced the Valsamakises out, like other merchants before them who cater to local residents.
‘Private Enterprise at Its Worst’
“It’s private enterprise at its worst. I heard it was a lease problem,” said Dan McFarland, 62, who has lived in Laguna for 50 years and gone to the Renaissance Bakery several times a week. “It’s awful,” he said of the closing. “Terrible.”
“It’s a sad day for Forest Avenue,” said Laurence Bulleit, a Saturday morning customer who works at the hair salon around the corner.
Outside the bakery, bicyclists in shiny shorts waiting to be served sat on a wooden bench next to a white-haired couple who plan to marry in March. A child ran out to pet a golden retriever tied to a parking meter.
“The atmosphere is old Laguna. This is as old as it gets,” Bulleit said. “The people here are old Laguna people. If you want to get your point across, you can do it here better than waiting at City Hall.”
At that moment, Mayor Dan Kenney walked into the bakery. He had heard the news Friday, he said, and wanted to see what he could do to help. Not much, he learned after a brief conversation with Valsamakis over the glass case filled with cakes, croissants, cookies and strudel.
The bakery, he said, is a town institution. “Believe me, when people find out about this, we’re going to get a lot of calls,” he said.
Clivia Powell, a travel agent, looked up from her morning paper. “I know most of the people in town. We don’t know where we’re going to go.”
Powell said the homey atmosphere of the bakery reminds her of cafes in her native Germany where “you can eat, read your paper, do your homework.”
Helen Valsamakis said the bakery’s recipes, which use only real butter, were developed by her Russian-born mother, whose diploma from the Cordon Bleu cooking academy in Paris hangs on the wall.
They decorated the bakery’s six wooden tables with hand-crocheted mats. And they banned smoking in the bakery even before the city passed its no-smoking ordinance, she said.
Opened About 1927
As a gastronomic loss, the closing of the Renaissance rivals the day in 1974 when the town lost Benton’s Restaurant, a cafe famous for peach pie, to construction of Main Beach, old-timers said.
The bakery, first called Covern’s Bakery, opened around 1927, said Les Chatham, a vice president of the Laguna Beach Historical Society. It was sold to George Fenders, then to William Trotter, then “some English people and some more English people,” said Chatham’s wife, Francis, 77, who worked in the bakery for 16 years, starting in 1929. “There were five owners after Trotter.”
They remember how the bakery escaped damage in the 1930 earthquake when the grocery store next door was flattened, and how everyone came to the bakery for bread after a flood in the 1950s cut off every road into town.
In those days, Francis Chatham knew everyone who walked by the bakery. She would bet customers double or nothing for their bill on the toss of a coin and won “many times over.”
“To me,” she said, the closing of the bakery “ends an era. When it’s part of your life, it does mean something to you.”
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