4beans4me
Tue, Dec-21-04, 07:02
December 21, 2004
'Let Them Eat Cake' Is No Longer a Formula for a Bakery's Survival
By JOSEPH BERGER
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/s.gifitting next to a mural of the Arc de Triomphe while polishing off a napoleon or an éclair, a first-time customer might have thought that Jon Vie Pastries and Cafe in Greenwich Village was an authentically French mainstay of a Manhattan quarter that resembles the Left Bank.
But Jon Vie was started 42 years ago by two men named John and Vito. The artfully distorted name and the faux French ambience stuck even though the most recent owner, a third-generation baker, likes to whip up Hungarian, German and Jewish confections as much as French ones.
Whatever its provenance, Jon Vie grew into a beloved neighborhood institution on Avenue of the Americas between 12th and 13th Streets, famous along the rows of side street brownstones not just for its moist strawberry shortcake and for the sweet buttery fragrance that drifted out its doors, but also for employees who bothered to find out how your day was going.
Now, the owner, Nathan Prusack, is informing its seven workers and hundreds of regular customers that the bakery is closing its doors at year's end, a victim of soaring rents in a neighborhood populated as much by bankers as by bohemians. The explosion of Starbucks-like franchises and a national infatuation with low-carb diets has also hurt.
At 76, Mr. Prusack said, he had also grown weary arguing with the board and management of Lawrence House, the white-brick co-op apartment building in which he is located. His lease, he said, will not allow the bakery to offer other kinds of food that he claims would keep it profitable.
"You can't exist on just cake anymore," said Mr. Prusack, who has arrived at the bakery at 4 a.m. every day for 22 years to command the kitchen and bake the Danishes, muffins and scones his customers love. Mr. Prusack, whose thinning white hair, gold-rimmed glasses and affable visage bring to mind the character actor Ed Wynn, said the latest blow was a $1,500 increase in his monthly rent effective next month, which put the total at well over $10,000.
"You can't pay that kind of rent with just cake and cookies," said Mr. Prusack.
Monty Sonnenborn, president of the co-op board of Lawrence House, at 79 West 12th Street, said that Jon Vie was covered by a master lease that allowed it to bake, and that he had not known that the bakery wanted to expand into preparing other kinds of food.
The end is particularly hard for Mr. Prusack, whose baking roots go back to a grandfather in Lithuania and who has been baking cakes since he was a 15-year-old student at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.
"My heart is literally broken over it," he said.
Shops that reflect an individual's idiosyncratic tastes are slowly disappearing in the Village, a trend repeated elsewhere in Manhattan. Two other baking landmarks, Patisserie Lanciani on 14th Street and A. Zito & Sons on Bleecker Street, have closed their Village shops in recent years.
"I remember when there were as many bakeries here as little bookstores," said Lewis Grossberger, a writer who has lived in the Village for 35 years. "At least the bookstores have been replaced by Barnes & Noble, but the bakeries are getting replaced by nothing."
Since it opened in 1962, Jon Vie, with a dozen cafe tables and its butter-cookie-packed display case framed by faded black-and-white-striped wallpaper, has had a tenacious following. Mr. Grossberger relishes the chocolate chip cookies, and said a close friend stops by for a couple of pounds of rugelach to take to her family in the Catskills every time she visits them. Ramsey Clark, the civil rights lawyer, wrote the bakery a letter from Paris saying its croissants were better than those he was then eating.
The actress Marisa Tomei, conscious of her figure, buys only a quarter-pound of rugelach at a time, said the bakery's manager, Sidney Kryshka. He likes to kid her that when she finally makes big money she should be able to afford half a pound. Mr. Kryshka told of one customer who has been getting house-shaped cookies for her two sons for years, even though they are now 26 and 22.
Even the neighborhood's dogs know the shop, because Jon Vie saves broken cookies for them. One dog that ran away from its owner a year ago was soon found inside the shop, drooling over the cookie case.
But the fact is, business has been slowing down. Mr. Kryshka, 73, a member of the fourth generation of a Warsaw-bred baking family who after 29 years at Jon Vie is almost as much a fixture as the white marble cake-decorating table, recalls a time when the machine that spits out numbers to keep the line of customers honest was in use every afternoon between 4 and 5.
"We had that many people buying cake on their way home," he said. "Now we don't use that machine except for Thanksgiving or other big holidays. People do not come in on their way home to pick up pastries or desserts. They're health-conscious.
"It doesn't figure," he added. "McDonald's are opening all over the place, but when it comes to a bakery they're health-conscious."
Mr. Kryshka's wife, Janice, who works nearby, at St. Vincent's Manhattan Hospital, was in tears yesterday as she described Jon Vie as the kind of shop where customers and employees share a certain level of intimacy.
"We knew about their families, we knew about events in their lives," she said by telephone from her home in Rego Park, Queens. "They'd come to start the day with Sid and have breakfast with him."
Mr. Kryshka, she said, would sometimes go to the Village on his day off, "and people would greet him all over the place" like a local celebrity.
"More people knew him there than know him here," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/nyregion/21bakery.html?ex=1104296400&en=85fabd2623739f7f&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1
'Let Them Eat Cake' Is No Longer a Formula for a Bakery's Survival
By JOSEPH BERGER
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/s.gifitting next to a mural of the Arc de Triomphe while polishing off a napoleon or an éclair, a first-time customer might have thought that Jon Vie Pastries and Cafe in Greenwich Village was an authentically French mainstay of a Manhattan quarter that resembles the Left Bank.
But Jon Vie was started 42 years ago by two men named John and Vito. The artfully distorted name and the faux French ambience stuck even though the most recent owner, a third-generation baker, likes to whip up Hungarian, German and Jewish confections as much as French ones.
Whatever its provenance, Jon Vie grew into a beloved neighborhood institution on Avenue of the Americas between 12th and 13th Streets, famous along the rows of side street brownstones not just for its moist strawberry shortcake and for the sweet buttery fragrance that drifted out its doors, but also for employees who bothered to find out how your day was going.
Now, the owner, Nathan Prusack, is informing its seven workers and hundreds of regular customers that the bakery is closing its doors at year's end, a victim of soaring rents in a neighborhood populated as much by bankers as by bohemians. The explosion of Starbucks-like franchises and a national infatuation with low-carb diets has also hurt.
At 76, Mr. Prusack said, he had also grown weary arguing with the board and management of Lawrence House, the white-brick co-op apartment building in which he is located. His lease, he said, will not allow the bakery to offer other kinds of food that he claims would keep it profitable.
"You can't exist on just cake anymore," said Mr. Prusack, who has arrived at the bakery at 4 a.m. every day for 22 years to command the kitchen and bake the Danishes, muffins and scones his customers love. Mr. Prusack, whose thinning white hair, gold-rimmed glasses and affable visage bring to mind the character actor Ed Wynn, said the latest blow was a $1,500 increase in his monthly rent effective next month, which put the total at well over $10,000.
"You can't pay that kind of rent with just cake and cookies," said Mr. Prusack.
Monty Sonnenborn, president of the co-op board of Lawrence House, at 79 West 12th Street, said that Jon Vie was covered by a master lease that allowed it to bake, and that he had not known that the bakery wanted to expand into preparing other kinds of food.
The end is particularly hard for Mr. Prusack, whose baking roots go back to a grandfather in Lithuania and who has been baking cakes since he was a 15-year-old student at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.
"My heart is literally broken over it," he said.
Shops that reflect an individual's idiosyncratic tastes are slowly disappearing in the Village, a trend repeated elsewhere in Manhattan. Two other baking landmarks, Patisserie Lanciani on 14th Street and A. Zito & Sons on Bleecker Street, have closed their Village shops in recent years.
"I remember when there were as many bakeries here as little bookstores," said Lewis Grossberger, a writer who has lived in the Village for 35 years. "At least the bookstores have been replaced by Barnes & Noble, but the bakeries are getting replaced by nothing."
Since it opened in 1962, Jon Vie, with a dozen cafe tables and its butter-cookie-packed display case framed by faded black-and-white-striped wallpaper, has had a tenacious following. Mr. Grossberger relishes the chocolate chip cookies, and said a close friend stops by for a couple of pounds of rugelach to take to her family in the Catskills every time she visits them. Ramsey Clark, the civil rights lawyer, wrote the bakery a letter from Paris saying its croissants were better than those he was then eating.
The actress Marisa Tomei, conscious of her figure, buys only a quarter-pound of rugelach at a time, said the bakery's manager, Sidney Kryshka. He likes to kid her that when she finally makes big money she should be able to afford half a pound. Mr. Kryshka told of one customer who has been getting house-shaped cookies for her two sons for years, even though they are now 26 and 22.
Even the neighborhood's dogs know the shop, because Jon Vie saves broken cookies for them. One dog that ran away from its owner a year ago was soon found inside the shop, drooling over the cookie case.
But the fact is, business has been slowing down. Mr. Kryshka, 73, a member of the fourth generation of a Warsaw-bred baking family who after 29 years at Jon Vie is almost as much a fixture as the white marble cake-decorating table, recalls a time when the machine that spits out numbers to keep the line of customers honest was in use every afternoon between 4 and 5.
"We had that many people buying cake on their way home," he said. "Now we don't use that machine except for Thanksgiving or other big holidays. People do not come in on their way home to pick up pastries or desserts. They're health-conscious.
"It doesn't figure," he added. "McDonald's are opening all over the place, but when it comes to a bakery they're health-conscious."
Mr. Kryshka's wife, Janice, who works nearby, at St. Vincent's Manhattan Hospital, was in tears yesterday as she described Jon Vie as the kind of shop where customers and employees share a certain level of intimacy.
"We knew about their families, we knew about events in their lives," she said by telephone from her home in Rego Park, Queens. "They'd come to start the day with Sid and have breakfast with him."
Mr. Kryshka, she said, would sometimes go to the Village on his day off, "and people would greet him all over the place" like a local celebrity.
"More people knew him there than know him here," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/nyregion/21bakery.html?ex=1104296400&en=85fabd2623739f7f&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1