Michelle Wojtowicz - The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook

All of this wouldnt have happened if it werent for Mikes pants. If he hadnt been wearing one of his signature pairs of overalls, we might not have noticed him standing on a street corner in Los Angeles, lugging a pair of chain saws on the way back from a landscaping job. If we hadnt noticed him, we wouldnt have pulled over. And if we hadnt stopped to say hello, Mike never would have announced to us that he was moving to Big Sur to open a restaurant, and the Big Sur Bakery would not exist.

Luckily, Mike was wearing overalls.

We pulled over our borrowed car (ours had just been stolen) and asked Mike how he was doing. He told us he was about to sell his house in Topanga and move to the most beautiful place on Earth.

Wheres that? Phil asked.

Big Sur, Mike said. Im opening a restaurant. Want to come check it out? It was January 2001 and at that point Michelle didnt even know where Big Sur was. Phil only knew about it from reading Kerouac. As a cook and a baker at Campanile, we loved what we were doing and werent looking to move or change jobs. Also, even though Mike had been a waiter at Joes in Venice when Phil was a cook, our friendship had never extended outside the restaurant, let alone into joint business ventures. But Mike was on a mission, and several hours later, we were talking with him over grilled cheese sandwiches at Campanile, learning about Big Sur. It was beautiful, he told us, describing redwoods and dramatic cliffs and the building he was leasing, a 1930s ranch house that was full of potential, despite the fact that its most recent incarnation was as a failed Italian restaurant. Plus, it had a hand-built wood-fired oven. We should come see itmaybe wed be interested in helping him with the food.

Mike convinced us to come up for a night, and so a couple days later we took a six-hour drive up the coast, carefully navigating Highway 1 as it twisted along the edge of the ocean, trying not to drive off the edge as we stared at the view. For us, two kids born and raised in New Jersey, the panorama of the Pacific was unlike anything wed ever seen, jaw-and stomach-dropping at the same time.

Photographs by Sara Remington

When we arrived in the early afternoon, Mike and his friend Terry Hide Princean extraordinarily generous Englishman whom Mike had been visiting in Big Sur for some twenty yearswelcomed us into a house-turned-abandoned-restaurant next to a gas stop and a deserted nursery, with a dusty dirt driveway and a pair of outdoor washrooms. Painted purple, orange, and blue, the restaurant had been left in disarray by the former tenant, and the garden was filled with screaming, mud-splattered children. This was no Los Angeles. But Terry put the kettle on, offered us our first installment of his famous homemade Hide bread, and gave us a tour of the restaurant, which had a bunch of bakery equipment and, as promised, a giant hand-built Alan Scott wood-fired oven. Before long we were sipping tea, talking story, and getting some of our first impressions of the place from locals who popped into the restaurant to say hello.

But Michelle was unconvinced. We had great jobs at Campanile and while we dreamed of someday opening up our own place, it was a fantasy that seemed years away from becoming a reality. Heading back down the coast, she bid farewell to Big Sur.

Then she got a look at Phil. He had what she calls his crazy eyes and even before he said anything, she knew his mind was made up. Michelle managed to hold him off for a day so that she could meet with Mike again and confirm with friends and family that Phil had, in fact, gone insane. But, as we said, Mike was determined. Two days after we got back, we had quit our jobs. Two weeks later, we were in Big Sur, sleeping on the restaurants floor because there was nowhere else to rent. It was terrifying, but then again, as Phil kept saying, we were in Big Sur. If we failed, no one would ever know.

As Terry started repainting, we cleaned up the place and Mike headed back down to Los Angeles to sell his house so that we would have funds to open. (Did we mention we didnt have money to start a restaurant?) We slept on the floor until an old-timer named Everett offered us a room in his house. We finally moved the day before we were supposed to open, but Mike kept sleeping in the dining room for several weeks before he found a place. Michelle would come in to start baking and there would be Mike, conked out on an army cot in the dining room. Hed wake up just around the time the pastries were coming out of the oven, tuck away his cot, and get to work serving coffee.