Historic Fort Bragg Bakery (and Historic Oven) Reopen
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Fort Bragg Bakery will make fresh bread daily.
When Chris and Tricia Kump open the doors of their new European-style retail bakery tomorrow, 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.
Original bricks from 1909 were rescued and rebuilt into a pizza oven.
Seasoned Bricks
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.
A Lot of Research
“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.”
Fort Bragg Bakery Offers its own labeled wines.
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.
Traveling Through Time
“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.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
We visit Fort Bragg twice a year from Nevada. We were taken by your wonderful bakery.
We are not big eaters, we both ordered a salad for almost $10.00 each. What a disappointment. The portion was a joke, like a small pre-meal salad. The mini salad was good but nothing special, we get goat cheese at Safeway. Immediately after leaving your restaurant we went directly to a competitor and ordered second salads for lunch that were less expensive than yours and an appropriate portion.
I suggest that no tourists or locals will give you repeat business after having one of your pricey mini salads.
We want you to succeed but you need to change your approach.
Your French roast was very nice.
December 20th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Hi, We’re happy you found us. Please let us know if the Fort Bragg Bakery’s Historic Oven makes it into whatever project you’re working on.
January 28th, 2010 at 11:27 am
Was in Fort Bragg for a family reunion in December and stumbled upon the bakery. What a wonderful surprise! The breads ( which we ended up buying every day we were there) were amazing and reminded my husband and I of a trip we took to France years ago. Morning pastries, and pizzas were also wonderful. We plan to make the Fort Bragg Bakery a stop on our itinerary every time we are in town.