Bakery will offer patries, bagels, bread and pizza.
When Chris and Tricia Kump open the doors of their new European-style retail bakery October 14, customers will be transported back 100 years in time. And they probably won’t even know it.
Of course, history will not be on the minds of most locals and tourists when they begin lining up at 7:30 a.m. for freshly baked breads, bagels, pastries, and espresso, and at 11:30 for pizzas, soup, salads and no-wait sandwiches.
They’ll be lured by the culinary creations of Chris Kump, a Paris-trained chef, and Philippe Garcia, an artisan baker from Lyon, France.
While Kump, Garcia and their team labor behind the scenes baking the day’s hearth breads and pastries in state of the art ovens, however, one piece of culinary equipment will be the center of everyone’s attention: a large brick façade pizza oven in the retail café.
Although the pizza oven is a relatively new addition to the building, the seasoned bricks are actually over 100 years old, part of the original oven, which began operation as early as 1909, when the Fort Bragg Bakery opened at its current location. To add some perspective, that was just three years after the 1906 Earthquake and subsequent fires destroyed San Francisco (and part of Fort Bragg), and the same year the nearby Point Cabrillo Lighthouse was being completed.
Now, the Rest of the Story
The bricks had been removed by the previous building owner and were thought to have been discarded in a landfill. Instead, they ended up covered with brambles in a backyard where Chris and Tricia rescued them earlier this year. After laboriously scrubbing them clean and careful planning, they returned the venerable bricks to their original home.
“With the help of the Fort Bragg Historical Society, previous owners and workers and a lot of our own research, we discovered that the bakery dates from at least 1909,” explained Tricia. “That is the earliest date we found records for the presence of the brick oven.”
Among those who helped reconstruct the history of the oven and bakery was Don Dutil, known as “Donut Dutil” by his classmates in the 1950’s, when he cooked as many as 120 dozen donuts for mill workers each morning before attending classes at Fort Bragg High.
“Chris and I both love history,” said Tricia, who points with pride to a “history wall” of old photos that she is assembling. The pictures and oven will transport us all to another time. The smell of fresh, hot pizza coming out of the oven will snap us back.
