Best Food Writing 2014 (39 page)

But there was more to it than that. Yard had long been fascinated by Austria, and had traveled there and obsessively studied the culture. When she showed up in L.A., she apologized for not bringing a résumé. What she did have was little cards with color drawings of her desserts, which she had laminated in order to show people in the kitchen how to plate them. She spread the cards out on the table for Puck to see and his eyes lit up. He grabbed a menu to show her his own colored drawings of dishes, which decorated Spago's menus in those days. “They looked identical to mine,” Yard says. “There was a pear tart on mine, and a pear tart on his. He said to me, ‘I have crayons, I have markers. You can share.' ”

For his part, Puck says he had no idea when they first met how well it would work out—much less that their collaboration would last 19 years. “It's like with anything,” he says. “You can fall in love with someone, and then a week later it's over—it's the same with finding people to work with. But the main attribute that I always appreciated, from the beginning, was her enthusiasm and her spirit.”

He gives that spirit a lot of the credit for why they worked so well together for so long, as well as the fact that he tries to give everyone who works for him the freedom to be creative and successful.

But Puck and Yard very much share an enthusiasm for the customer-service side of the business. “Sherry's personality is fantastic,” Puck says. “When I wasn't there in the restaurant, she was happy to go out and talk to the customers, make them something special, be that face of the restaurant. She was really my No. 2 for many years in that respect. There are many people who can make great desserts,
or are great cooks. But she's not only a great pastry chef, she has an amazing passion for hospitality.”

Sherry Yard and Sang Yoon have known each other for years, since the days when Yoon worked as a cook at Chinois, Wolfgang Puck's Santa Monica fusion restaurant. They share many things in common: their initials, their love of Champagne, their lucky number (11). They are both left-handed but both play sports with their right hands. These things are important to Yard—she's a strong believer in fate, in things feeling right.

Two years ago, Yard and Yoon ran into each other at the James Beard Awards in New York City. Yard was on the verge of signing a lease for the spot in the Grove that is now Umami Burger, and she told Yoon about her plans for a bakery. “It dawned on me—holy shit, she's actually leaving Spago,” Yoon says. “So I told her about the space at Helms, about how I had always wanted to open a bakery there.” Yard told him she'd do it with him. They pinkie-promised. “She told me, ‘My pinkie promise is better than a written contract.' ” When she returned to L.A., she called off the deal at the Grove.

“If Sherry hadn't agreed to do this with me, I might not have wanted to do it at all,” Yoon says. “But if Sherry Yard says she wants to do something with you, you do that thing.”

At first, it was just going to be a bakery. That alone made a nice headline: “Sherry Yard and Sang Yoon Bring Baking Back to the Historic Helms Bakery.” But somehow, in the two years since that first pinkie promise, the project has morphed into something else entirely. Yes, there will still be a bakery.

“My initial thought was, this used to be a grand bakery, so let's mass-produce some things and be really well known for one thing—maybe it's a cream puff, maybe it's a doughnut,” Yard says. “Then I got an office at Helms. Once I got an office on-site, and I really started to get to know the neighborhood, I started to look and say, ‘What do they need here?' And the truth is: How much can I bake? How many people are going to walk through the door? When I started to do the math, with all my experience in catering and mass production, I can do a lot of baking in a very small space. So, with 4,000 square feet, to create a bakery, I realized that a lot of that
product is going to have to go out the back door,” meaning wholesale rather than retail.

“I don't want that,” she says. “I'd rather bake 14 times a day than bake one time a day and have all the bakers go home and then everything's 14 hours old by the time anyone eats it. No.”

So her plans for the kitchen space began to change, to shrink. She realized that part of what the neighborhood needs is somewhere to eat. She wanted a great sandwich. She wanted a place to sit down.

Somehow, over the months, that conversation between Yard and Yoon led to a plan not just for a bakery where you can get a great sandwich but also a full-blown food hall. Helms Hall and Bakery will be a bakery, yes, but right now the plans are for it to also have a coffee and pastry bar, a deli, a wood-fired oven, hot and cold stations, a rotisserie, a carving station, seating, a long cookie and confections counter, and over in one corner a beautiful little glassed-in dinette. The dinette, which Yard giddily describes as being “like a three-star Michelin restaurant but a diner,” will be open for breakfast and lunch. The rest of the hall will be open from early morning until 8 or 9 p.m.

The original Helms Bakery operated from 1931 to 1969. Started by Paul Helms, a New York baker who had moved to Southern California, the bakery began with 32 employees. Helms products were never sold in stores; instead they were distributed fresh each day by trucks called “coaches.” The coaches operated much like ice cream trucks, driving through neighborhoods and sounding a whistle. They also stopped at houses: People displayed blue “H” signs in their windows to alert drivers to stop. There were 11 routes in 1931 when Helms opened—at the height of its success in the 1950s, Helms served more than 950.

Many things lead to the demise of Helms—the advent of the supermarket, women joining the workforce, the rise of cheaper, mass-produced breads. Despite the fact that Helms ceased operations in 1969, the brand name, building and trucks remain powerful symbols for people who grew up in Los Angeles, who remember that whistle and its promise of cream puffs and doughnuts and bread baked that morning.

In 1971 the Marks family, led by Wally Marks Jr., bought the complex.
In the past 40 years, it has held everything from an antiques mall to a jazz club.

In recent years, Wally Marks III, Wally Jr.'s son, has made a concerted effort to expand the complex, curate tenants and create a space for design and food. In 2005 HD Buttercup, the largest furniture store in Los Angeles, opened in what had been a giant antiques store. The following year, Yoon opened Father's Office, his temple to beer and upscale bar food. Since then, many more furniture and design stores have opened, and in 2010 Yoon opened Lukshon, a sleek, modern take on Southeast Asian food.

Father's Office and Lukshon have given Helms some serious food credibility, but the Helms Hall and Bakery could make the place a food destination on a whole different level, getting people to think of Helms in food terms the way they currently think of it in design terms: as one of the city's major hubs.

Yoon admits he's nervous about taking on such an ambitious project. “We're trying to look at it like it's five separate food businesses under one roof, each of them separate, individual pieces. When you look at it that way, it's a divide-and-conquer thing. But yeah, it's a big thing to take on no matter how you look at it.”

Not only is the food hall a lot of different moving parts, but Yard and Yoon also envision the bakery aspect somewhat differently from a regular bakery. “Sherry hates what she calls the ‘adoption process,' where there are a bunch of cakes and pies sitting out waiting to be adopted,” Yoon says. “It breaks her heart. She's invested in doing everything fresh.”

Yard echoes this, saying, “If someone wants to order a cake, I might say, ‘OK, when do you want to eat it? What time are your guests arriving? Six p.m.? So you might be done with dinner around 8:30? Fine, you can pick up the cake at 4. Any earlier than that, it won't be good, it won't be fresh.' ”

What isn't as clear is how she plans to do this for every single item in the bakery, from cookies to bread, pies to cream puffs. Talk to her about any single item they plan on serving in the hall and Yard gets worked up about how things should be done, about the history of that item, about the ways she will do it better. She can talk for 10 minutes straight and a mile a minute about toast—about how thick toast should be cut, about how toast should be buttered, about why
no one ever gets toast right. Oh, and she plans to mill her own flour on-site. “I'm trying to learn and absorb everything I can right now about grains,” she says.

The most interesting thing about Helms Hall and Bakery might be how these two perfectionists will handle a giant operation with so many moving parts, 50 employees and three reputations—hers, his and the Helms complex—resting on their success.

So what took Yard so long to strike out on her own? Someone with so many ideas, so much passion and the force of personality to drive a hundred successful businesses—why did she stay with Puck for so long?

“I still have the original red file folder from 1995, when Wolfgang and I were going to open a bakery together,” she says. “From the very beginning, he said to me, ‘You love bread so much. I'll help you open a bakery.' ”

It wasn't that he wasn't serious, either; it's just that every time an idea, a location, a plan was put into place, for some reason it fell through.

Five years ago, Yard had to get some work done on her teeth and one of the dentists at the practice caught her eye. “The next time in, I asked the receptionist, ‘Is Dr. Ines single?' She said he was, so I asked him out.”

Three months later, they were engaged. Maybe it was her marriage that got her thinking about creating something of her own.

Or maybe it was just time: time to remember the pastry chefs. Time to indulge our sweet tooth a bit. And high time Sherry Yard got her due.

I
t was a February night in the back room of Gramercy Tavern, at a dinner for Ed Behr and the
Art of Eating.
Every guest—writers, chefs, editors—was a household name for American food nerds. All, except for one: an Asian man, maybe in his late forties, with close-cropped hair and a sturdy look. He smiled graciously but had a visitor's air amidst the cheek kissers. Every once in a while someone called him “Chef.”

We introduced ourselves eventually. “I'm Alex,” he said as we shook hands. Alex . . . Alex . . . a name I'd only read before jumped into my mind, and I could feel my eyes grow wider. “Alex
Lee
?” I asked.

Way back, before Daniel Boulud was President of the Restaurant Universe, when he was still just a young star with a lot of promise, when he'd just left Sirio Maccioni's Le Cirque to strike out on his own, Alex Lee was right there with him. He was trained by Ducasse in Monte Carlo, by a grandmother in Italy (a grandmother who happened to have three Michelin stars at Dal Pescatore), and by his own Chinese grandmother. He spoke perfect French with long Long Island o's and, straddling the divide between Boulud's French and
American cooks, became Restaurant Daniel's first chef de cuisine. He was one of the first chefs to braise pork belly in American haute cuisine, to season roasted lobster with soy sauce in the foie-and-truffles world. But this was 1993, before the Food Network made chefs into living-room fixtures, before Tony Bourdain made them into pirate heroes, before the Internet made them buzz. Back then, it was really just work. Work, and, if you cared, craft. Alex Lee cared.

He poked and prodded every box of ingredients that came into the restaurant, constantly writing ideas and combinations on his clipboard, making eight or nine specials a night in a restaurant where diners might come only once in their lives. He giddily called cooks around to show them a new squash he'd grown on his rooftop, and he destroyed their mise en places—and maybe them—if they were doing it wrong. Daniel's kitchen was a constant hurricane as it cooked furiously for its fourth
New York Times
star, and he stood at its center. He pushed and yapped and yelled and willed it into the most celebrated restaurant in New York, blowing 200 minds a night and training a whole generation of brilliant, steeled chefs in the process.