A 135-year-old California bakery struggles to stay alive.

The screen on my phone was overheating, but it wasn’t hard to find my way to my destination: Pyrenees French Bakery in East Bakersfield.

The bakery’s main building is a desert bone white with an antique sign and logo that hasn’t changed since the 1940s. May be empty on weekday afternoons.

As I was waiting to speak with the owners, a customer walked in. She examined the crusty loaves of bread posted on the shelf behind the cash register and indicated her order. She works with sliced ​​white bread, a pair of bagels, and a shepherd’s circle.

The customer collects her purchases, hands over a $20 bill and receives $12. Even adjusted for inflation, it’s hard to imagine a more economical way to get food on this street, or any other in California.

But the lines that should be outside the door and not around the block. It’s hard to keep an institution afloat – just ask the family who owns it.

Pyrenean bread, a Basque immigrant staple

Started by a Basque immigrant named Marius M. Hospitalier, the Pyrenees French Bakery first came to life in 1887, then called the Kern City French Bakery. At that time it was both a bakery and a saloon, and the French round was six cents.

The current wife, Marianne Laxag, was born in 1940. She says she doesn’t remember much before 1947, when her parents, Pierre and Juanita, bought the bakery from the second set of owners, French immigrants Joe and Leah Guidan. The Gaidans gave the bakery its current name, after the border of the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain, which they and others in the area first called home.

The name Pyrenees, Laxag explains, is a tribute to the bakery’s longtime and most loyal customers, the Basque community that first came to the Central Valley, Bakersfield, who were shepherds in the mid-1800s and who became more involved in that business. More than a century.

The area was a hive of French, Italian, Mexican activity – but mostly with the Basques. On Sundays, you line up in the Pyrenees for the shepherd’s bread, the bakery’s signature, where the bread is squeaky clean and 10 times lighter than your average dough. It’s great for cooking soup or boiled beans or bologna, and on its own, it melts on the tongue in a way that heavy breads can’t.

Basque residents flock to the bar at the Noriega Hotel for a French aperitif called picon punch, a mixture of brandy, soda water, amer picon and grenadine. After a meal and some drinks. They flow out of the now-shuttered center, which was built in 1893 and was the area’s first and most popular victim of the Covid-19 outbreak.

‘What have you got without bread?’

Bread is a serious business. But doing so during a pandemic is even more difficult.

The bakery lives in the middle of a rundown industrial neighborhood east of downtown. Known as Old Town Kern.

Around the corner is Luigi’s, a fourth-generation family-run deli and wool grower, a family-style basque outlet in the neighborhood that serves everything from first courses to bakery rounds. The Pyrenees sits alongside the Lazo, a stark, windowless old pool hall where day drunks and hunters alike pour in for a smoke.

Luigi’s, Wool Growers and Lazo, Arizona Cafe and Pyrenees Cafe (with different owners, but serving the bread) are all within a two block radius. It’s the closest thing to a mall-style food court in this Central Valley metro of 379,000. A charming and historic neighborhood, but neglected by the locals.

Today, the Pyrenees French Bakery is the neighborhood’s main bread supplier, an integral part of what the area has to offer. “The Pyrenees is the backbone,” Luigi’s owner and general manager Gino Valpredo told me during a recent visit. “What have you got without bread?”

“Now it’s a struggle.”

Now 82, Laxag is still a leader in the Pyrenees. She sold the business in 1996 to Mike George, a former Rainbow Bread executive, but bought it a decade later. At that time she brought more. family, namely her nephew and niece (by marriage) Rick and Cheri Laxag, to help run it. Today, she is at the bakery six days a week.

Marianne Lacsag’s father, who emigrated from the old country as a sheep herder, learned the trade at a competing bakery in the neighborhood called the French American Bakery. In the mid-70s, save for sales and travel in accounting for a flooring company on the road, she has been in the Pyrenees all her life, “from the hall, after school, until now”.

The matriarch of the Pyrenees is useless. Rick and Cheri assure me she’s earned the right not to mince words, and she won’t. Any romantic notion of owning a bakery that has graced the city and surrounding area for nearly a century and a half is evident in her approach.

“It’s a struggle now,” Marianne said. “We had a great time. Just like everyone else, we are struggling. He bought us a big loaf of bread. We had seven roads, all with labels up and down the valley, but now we are in town.

“We still do it the same way.”

It’s hard to give Cheri Laksag a complete snapshot of the business as it is today, or perhaps a lesson in reverse.

On the one hand, the Pyrenees is an industrial bakery built for centuries to supply bread to the city and region, from fine dining to deli counters to school lunches and family holiday tables.

On the other hand, it is an endless effort, a labor of love. The bread is made daily without any preservatives, according to the original recipe and from the origin of the bakery, which comes from the old country, according to the family.

Still, the quality of the bread is not enough to ensure success. “The stores used to work with you, they don’t anymore,” Rick says, noting that the bakery still turns out 2,000 to 3,000 units a day. “We can do a lot more than that. We used to do a lot more. But big companies buy shelf space.

“The priority at the time was the locals, the Pyrenees,” says Cherry. “Now it’s not about fresh baking every day, it’s about the contracts that these big bakers make for everyone. [grocery chain’s] Places. We cannot compete.

If it was simply a quality race, Pyrenees would win hands down, the family expects.

“I’m up against the bakeries in LA or San Francisco,” says Rick. “We have a design. We’ve been doing this — something artistic — longer, better, than anyone else. It starts with time. They’re talking 10 to 14 days to create a starter. That’s why we take a piece, redevelop it and continue the process. We still do it the same way.”

‘Everything is done here’

During a tour of the facility, Marian showed her the kilns her father built, firing seven days a week for more than six decades. She also introduces me to some bakers.

It was Francisco Ochoa carrying fresh bread into the retail area – the last few of the day. Then Bakersfield-born Benny Andrade stepped in as a customer. Andrade, who has worked at the bakery for two decades, said that job “put my kids through college — one is a doctor and the other is a teacher.” He makes the tour coincide with the last bread drop. “You always want it to be fresh,” he says. “It’s good anytime, but when it’s fresh – it’s unbeatable.”

“Everything is done by hand, everything is done right here,” says Marian. “We have molds and things, but as far as putting it on the sheet, putting it in and out of the oven, packing all the ingredients, it’s all under this roof. And that’s worth pointing out.”

Rick and Cheri share a laugh about the neighborhood – or perhaps the pipes running under the building – that give the Pyrenees bread its unique flavor. Maybe, like the bagels in New York or the pizza crust, Rick guesses, there’s something in the water that gives the bread a little extra.

Not long after the elder Laxagues bought the bakery, one of the first orders to go through was Montanan. He was so impressed, he sent more to the house. Family legend has it that Juanita never cashed the $1 check to send the loaves.

Those who try the bread will never forget it, says Marianne.

it’s true. It was at the nearby Luigi’s restaurant for an afternoon snack when I finally sampled the Pyrenees bread. Pirenne’s delicious roll is mixed with dry and cotto salami, mortadella, provolone and Swiss cheeses, mustard, lettuce and onion – and Luigi’s secret sauce. All the ingredients are discarded but not crushed.

Front to back, first taste to finish, the bread stays firm and true, crunchy to the bite and soft in the middle, chewy but not cloying.

As Valpredo points out, it’s the backbone of the food — and perhaps the city itself.