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Oakland’s New Sweet Spot
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Eric Wahlgren
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Last Updated on October, 07 2008 at 01:10 PM
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| Miette Pâtisserie and Confiserie founder Meg Ray is bringing her fanciful, hand-crafted cakes and pastries to Jack London Square where she’s opening a bakery, retail shop, and new baking school. |
| For Meg Ray, it all started as a kid when her fudge cake won a blue
ribbon at a county fair. A career in tech got in the way, but the
baking bug, as she calls it, eventually came back to bite her hard when
she was laid off from her Silicon Valley job in 2001 during the dot-com
bust. Ray and her business partner began selling elegant cakes and
pastries, which would look perfectly at home behind any Parisian
pâtisserie counter, at the Berkeley Farmers’ market. |
For Meg Ray, it all started as a kid when her fudge cake won a blue ribbon at a county fair. A career in tech got in the way, but the baking bug, as she calls it, eventually came back to bite her hard when she was laid off from her Silicon Valley job in 2001 during the dot-com bust. Ray and her business partner began selling elegant cakes and pastries, which would look perfectly at home behind any Parisian pâtisserie counter, at the Berkeley Farmers’ market.
Word soon got out about Miette, which means crumb, and the pair was offered a space in San Francisco’s Ferry Building. Now, there’s also a confiserie in Hayes Valley designed to look and feel like an old-world European sweet shop. Whether it’s the macarons, Princess Cakes, pots de crème, or lemon tarts—everything is made with local organic ingredients and to terribly exacting standards. Miette brownies, for instance, are each baked in an individual pan because the owners ruled those cooked on a sheet and then cut with a knife looked too sloppy.
For East Bay residents, there’s some more icing on the cake: In the spring of 2009, Ray plans to open a third location in Jack London Square, across the street from the Jack London Market, which is slated to house the largest collection of artisan food purveyors on the West Coast. Although Ray, 41, is still deciding on a name—it will be something other than Miette to reflect Oakland’s unique character—the renovated 1926 warehouse will be her biggest location yet at 2,500 square feet. The space will allow her to move her production facility to the square, as well as run a retail store and new baking school.
Oakbook contributor Eric Wahlgren recently chatted with Ray about her plans, baking trends, and her sweet tooth. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:
Q: What brings you to Oakland?
A: Well, Oakland is my hometown. It’s where I live. I wasn’t actually born here. I was born in Palo Alto. But I’ve lived here for the last 15 years. And I love Oakland. I want to help improve the quality life, whether it’s to bring something new to the scene or to help bring other people to the scene who have great food and other offerings. I think the Jack London Square location is a great place to start this renaissance of food.
Q: You’re moving into an old, historic warehouse. Was it love at first sight?
A: I love that building. I think it’s fantastic. It has these floor-to-ceiling windows. So you’ll be able to see right into the bakery and watch the production. Likewise, from the inside out, you can see trains going by and people going by, and I think it truly characterizes Oakland. So yes, it was love at first sight.
Q: You’ll be right across the street from the Jack London Market, Oakland’s answer to San Francisco’s Ferry Building? That must be a plus?
A: It’s so exciting to think that the farmers will be showing up with their fresh produce and we can literally go outside our front door, grab some fruit, and within a couple hours, have it delivered to you as a pie, or a cobbler, or some other pastry using the fruit. And it will be that immediate. It’s like having an orchard outside your front door.
Q: Why a cooking school?
A: I’ve been a guest instructor at Tante Marie’s Cooking School for the last three years and I love the teaching aspect of a cooking school. It’s a way to explain my knowledge without having it be in a work setting.
What’s exciting to me is that everybody at school is always so eager and enthusiastic about baking. It really brings back to me many of the reasons why I got into baking in the first place. There is just that level of wonderment and all these people are sort of bit by the baking bug.
Q: Aren’t you worried about minting potential competitors?
A: It’s just the way it is. They’d be there anyway. I look at the restaurants that I admire like Chez Panisse, for example. So much of what they do is prepare chefs to go out and create their own restaurants and I guess create competition.
But what I like about it being a school is obviously I am not going to be able to teach every class, so I will invite in pastry chefs whom I admire. We will get to work together in a non-competitive way. I like the philosophy of that and I like the energy that that will bring to the school.
Q: What type of courses will you offer?
A: There will be courses on candy-making, cake baking, and cake decorating. And you’ll probably break that down into cakes that use fruit, or pound cakes, or seasonal holiday cakes, and things like that.
We will very much focus on cakes that you would want to bake at home. Everyone is looking for a pocketful of perfect recipes. So if I can send every student home with a repertoire of recipes, then I will be successful.
Q: Speaking of learning, you won first place for your fudge cake at a county fair when you were a kid. Is that how it all started?
A: Yes, it really is. I grew up on Whidbey Island in Washington state. There was nothing to do there. And I would come home from school and I would just bake my way through cookbooks. And my mother allowed me to do this, which I now find, as a mother of an 11-year-old, very hard to believe. She let me make terrific messes and use so many ingredients.
I never considered the financial aspect of that, but it is expensive to bake. I was just very interested and self-disciplined in terms of learning. So I must have been 11 or 12 when I won first place. That was rewarding. I’ve never stopped loving to bake since then.
Q: Will the Oakland store be different from your San Francisco ones?
A: I think Oakland is a little different than San Francisco. So I am trying to find a product match that truly matches the city’s character. So part of that is going to be based on the fact that the market is just right out the front door. So there are going to be a lot more pies and cobblers that use fresh fruit. A lot more fruit will come into play.
Due to the fact that I don’t have to deliver the products anywhere, I am going to make really gloppy, precarious desserts—more mousses, more things that are assembled just minutes before serving.
Q: Where do you get your inspiration for all your cakes?
A: Generally, the way I start is with a traditional cake or recipe. Whether that’s American, or French, or Viennese, or from wherever, I am a traditionalist in a sense. And then I like to reinterpret that in a more Californian sense. We don’t use heavy glazes on our fruit tarts because that is just not what want people want to eat. They want to see the fresh fruit shining through.
I also like things that are sort of graphic or iconic in the way they look. I often think of an illustration of how I would draw that cake and have that appear as a final product. But if you look at my product line, I don’t stray too far from the traditional repertoire of French and American cakes. And I’m not really that daring with flavors. It’s sort of straight up in my own special way.
Q: What do people want out of their baked goods these days?
A: I think they want to know intellectually that the quality of the ingredients is high; so organic flour, fresh fruit. All of that speaks to the food environment that we live in. But if you set that aside, they really want something that tastes really good, and buttery, and somehow nostalgic, which is very hard to bake since everyone has a different nostalgia.
But there is something in baking today that has been lost if you go to a grocery store and buy a baked good, or if you go to Costco. So what the missing piece is I try to find and produce. But for me, I like the taste of butter. I like things that are really well done but still homemade. So professionally produced homemade products.
Q: What are your top sellers?
A: Keep in mind that this bakery will not be a Miette. There might be some close variations on what we make at Miette. But in terms of bestsellers at Miette, there is always a top-selling chocolate item and a top-selling fruit item. And that’s sort of my breakdown on people: You are either a chocolate person or a fruit person. The Scharffen Berger cake, which is just the bittersweet cake with ganache on it, is the No. 1 seller and also the macarons, the Parisian-style macarons.
Q: What's next? Is Miette going to keep expanding?
A: As you think about getting older, running a bakery is really grueling. But teaching is not so much that. I really feel that teaching, running the school, and bringing in other teachers, that’s going to keep me interested until the end of my days.
Q: So what do you do to get away from the oven?
A: I can’t. I don’t. I just love the kitchen. No matter any day of the week, that’s where I am. When we go away on vacation, that’s where I am. I just love it so much. I guess I go to the bathtub occasionally.
Q: If there were some sort of crazy baking dictatorship and you were told you could only eat sweets from one country, which country would that be?
A: I like American sweets. I love French pastry -- I really do. But ultimately, my favorites are a brownie, strawberry shortcake with fresh berries and fresh whipped cream, and even an angel food cake. Anytime you pair an angel food cake with cream and fresh fruit, that’s all I really want. So I’d have to say American sweets. |
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