They say that all things old become new again, and that is certainly true of bakeries in Bergen. The current trend is for natural foods without additives, and that’s how the best bakeries are doing it. Many rely on recipes that have been passed down through families, from the days before high-fructose corn syrup became a staple of the American diet. And if there is one thread uniting the diverse types of bakeries in this county, it is love of the craft and devotion to detail and heritage.

Très, Très Parisienne
André Schneider likes to say that he was born to bake, and by 9 a.m. on any given Saturday, he’s already been hand-rolling, dusting and fluting crusts since midnight. He and wife, Anne, have owned Patisserie St. Michel on Queen Anne Road in Teaneck for 27 years, and retirement is still a distant thought.

From the time he was a young boy in Paris during World War II, André realized that his destiny would entail expertly crafting profiteroles and chocolate éclairs. His mother worked at Le Bon, a traditional French pastry shop near the Eiffel Tower, and her little son would meet her there after school. “I fell in love with the delicious smells of the shop,” recalls Andre, with a wistful look that calls to mind Proust’s madeleines and remembrances of things past. The customer who happens upon his little Teaneck shop with the fancy lace window curtains can experience some of that same romantic Parisian feeling.

Recently, Marilyn King stopped in to order a croque en bouche (literally, “crunch in the mouth”) for her daughter’s bridal shower. Showing the Schneiders a photo of the masterpiece André had made for the young woman’s engagement party, the Teaneck resident asked for another just like it – a beautiful tower of cream puffs covered with a shell of spun sugar.

“Everybody stood around it, and was so excited to see it cracked open and the delicious pastries pulled off,” explains the appreciative mother. “It was perfect for Rebecca, since she is a French teacher in Fort Lee and fell in love with all things French when she studied in Paris.”

The Schneiders have a steady stream of customers like King who are thrilled to find that authentic French experience. “Most of our customers have traveled, and are very sophisticated in their tastes,” says Anne, who also notes that this client base is intensely loyal; they think nothing of driving from New York City to order wedding cakes.  

“These are my own recipes, which I know by heart,” explains André, who is proud of his resistance to fads. “This is classic French baking, and we stick to what we are. When we tried something ‘in vogue’ once, the customers told us, ‘I don’t come here to buy cheesecake.’”

In the summer, the zucchini, eggplant and tomatoes in the vegetable tartes are grown right in the Schneiders’ home garden. “Everything we use is natural, with absolutely no chemicals,” says Anne, who does the gardening herself, besides coordinating all customer service for the bakery.

For fall, the couple rotates in fresh fruit pies, pumpkin brûlée in a pastry shell and pecan galletes. For a traditional French Christmas, there are always elaborately decorated bouche de Noël (Christmas logs) layered with chocolate or coffee mousse and flavored with Grand Marnier.

Bavarian Cream Puff
Reinhold’s Bakery in Waldwick has been in its same spot on Franklin Turnpike since April 1959, when a young couple newly arrived from Germany, Hannelore and Reinhold Gramsch, decided to try out a business based on the craft that Reinhold had learned from his baker father. Using the family recipes proved to be a success for the Gramsches, who have built a thriving business on delicious Black Forest cakes layered with raspberries, beehive cakes of honey and Bavarian cream, sachertortes with chocolate ganache, linzer tartes, apple strudels, stollen, Yule logs, cookies of varied types and specialty birthday and wedding cakes.

“Everything here is handmade,” points out Hannelore, who is better known by customers as “Mrs. Reinhold” – she never corrects them about her surname actually being Gramsch. “I have two names now,” she says with an impish smile. Her husband has retired from baking, but Mrs. Reinhold is still an important presence at the bakery. “I do all the decorating,” she notes. “I’m a jack-of-all-trades, and I still love it.”

Through the years, the three Gramsch children, Reinhold, Christine and Glenn, have all worked at the shop. Now, it is owned by Glenn. “It’s a real family business,” says Hannelore, pointing to two teenagers working behind the counter. “They’re not really mine, but I tell them they are, and that they’re in my boot camp now.”

She relishes pointing out the edges on cookies that are artfully displayed in trays behind the glass-fronted counter. “If you look carefully, you can see they aren’t perfect.” That’s a sign, Hannelore explains, that the cookies are completely handmade – hardly a given at bakeries nowadays.  “It’s all natural, with no preservatives,” she adds proudly.

Even though the brightly colored “Cookie Monster” cupcakes do not date back to the original family bakery of Reinhold’s childhood in Westphalia, the recipes are truly family secrets that have been passed down, with only the smallest of variations here and there.

 As proud as she is about the high standards of the bakery, Mrs. Reinhold is just as proud of the packages she sends to local servicemen serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the shop’s entrance, she has devoted an area to photos of the soldiers and their many thank-you letters. She’s been invited to many a “welcome home” party, and she knows many details about the lives of “her” boys. More than a few customers donate to the fund she started in order to send necessities like toothpaste and soap overseas each month. For Christmas, she makes sure that each of the troops receives her bakery treats as well.

“I lived through the war in Germany, and I know how hard the soldiers’ lives can be,” she says.

Proud to be Kosher
Customers who stop in at Zadies Kosher Bake Shop in Fair Lawn on a Friday will most likely join a long line of regulars, many of them wearing yarmulkes, who are patiently waiting for their turn.

“Seventy percent of our business is done on Thursdays and Fridays, when customers come to buy challahs for their Shabbat meals,” explain the baker’s apron-clad Larry Steinberg, while taking a rare break. His son, Joshua, is officially the owner of Zadies – although everyone working here seems to be either an immediate family member, related by marriage, or just so close to the Steinbergs that they’ve become family.

It is traditional for Jewish people who are keeping kosher homes to begin their Friday night Shabbat meal, and the two meals eaten on the Sabbath day (Saturday), with a blessing over two loaves of challah. At Zadies, the bread is available in a host of flavors, including plain and whole wheat, and with chocolate, onion or garlic.

Larry Steinberg grew up in bakeries on Long Island owned by his father, Abraham. From him, Larry learned two mantras that he credits with Zadies’ success: “You can never fool a customer through the mouth” and “Quality is first and foremost.” Even on days when the line stretches out the front door, the lively crew behind the counter greets everyone like an old friend – which many customers have become.

In addition to the challahs, there are muffins, cookies, pies and cakes of all sorts. “People come for the challahs and have to try everything else,” explains Larry, pointing to the display case of intricately decorated chocolate cakes and fruit “rockets” – turnovers filled with fresh blueberries and apples.

The recipes date bake to the early years of the family business on Long Island; indeed, the future seems set for more Steinberg bakers to come. Larry’s wife, Ann, is very proud of a picture she has posted in the shop of a children’s birthday party that was recently held at the bakery. It was for one of the youngest Steinbergs, who was photographed along with his little pals wearing chefs hats and baking. “All my children play here,” adds Larry, “just as I did when I was at my father’s side.”

Menu specials change with the seasons and holidays. For Hanukkah, there will be sufganyot, jelly doughnuts cooked in oil to commemorate the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days instead of one, when the Maccabees reclaimed the temple on Jerusalem’s Mount Moriah.

And, of course, there will always be challah bread for sale at Zadies.

A Taste of Counterculture
Sweet Avenue Bake Shop in Rutherford is riding the wave of cupcakes’ newfound popularity, but with a very important twist – the cakes are completely vegan (dairy and egg-free). Customers who don’t know that are often very surprised that the specialty cupcakes still taste as delicious as Grandma used to make.

Danielle and Jake Vance opened the shop in August 2007, and are assisted by Danielle’s sister, Kristina. The three pride themselves on making everything from scratch; they also serve as the creative development team.

“Someone has to taste the new flavors,” explains Jake, who admits a fondness for the red velvet cupcakes. “I was raised in Texas, and that is everyone’s favorite cake there.”

The boutique-style bakery is decorated in bright pastel colors that go well with the colorful cupcakes, which boast names like Sexy Sadie (red velvet cake) and Strawberry Fields (vanilla cake with fresh strawberry frosting filled with strawberry preserves), and are artistically displayed in glass cases. Both Danielle and Jake are graphic artists by training. “We really have an eye for what looks appealing,” says Jake, pointing to a tiered wedding cake made out of individual cupcakes that is displayed in the front window.

The couple had been vegetarians for several years when, in 2006, they decided to become vegans. At first, it seemed as though giving up dairy and eggs would mean an end to their favorite baked goods, but Danielle began to experiment with her mother’s family recipes. While growing up in Weehawken, she used to help her mother bake hundreds of trays of cookies for the neighborhood each Christmas. “She was famous for her 100 percent-authentic Italian cookies,” Danielle remembers.

Those recipes have inspired a successful line of cupcakes. “Each month since we opened, our business has grown,” notes Jake, who attributes that success to the trio’s unique product line. Since the Vances can’t buy any prepackaged mixes, everything is done right in the shop. For their raspberry lavender lemon cupcakes, for example, they use fresh fruit, and boil the lavender buds themselves to extract the flavoring.

For the upcoming holidays, pumpkin spice, apple pie, lemon gingerbread, and eggnog cupcakes will be featured – to the amazement of tasters who might not believe that they really are egg and dairy-free.

Slice of Sicilian
Though it sits in a nondescript strip mall on Market Street in Saddle Brook, Maria’s Italian Bakery would fit right in in Palermo, or on one of the high-end shopping streets in Milan or Rome. The cookies, cakes and cannoli are elegantly displayed, authentic and taste as good as they look.

Customers come from all over Bergen for two of owner Maria Scaduto’s hard-to-find Sicilian specialties: cartocci and inis. The pastries are filled with cannoli cream, fried or baked, and topped with powdered sugar on the cartocci, bread crumbs on the inis. Scaduto’s flaky “lobster tails” are crescent-shaped sweets that resemble the crustacean in their shape; they too are filled with luscious cannoli cream. And for customers who just want traditional cannoli, these are plentiful too – either plain or hand-dipped in a chocolate shell.

For the holidays, there will be Scaduto’s very special cassata siciliana, a cannoli cream-filled sponge cake, flavored with rum and covered with a sugar icing and citrus fruits. “It’s very, very rich,” notes the Sicilan-born Scaduto. Baking was the family business on both her mother’s and father’s sides in Italy, and after the family moved to Brooklyn when Scaduto was 6 years old, they opened a bakery. “I used to go in the back and help, even when I was a little girl,” she remembers. “My father would say ‘Put a cherry here,’ or other little things like that to help decorate cookies, and by the time I was 9, I could really bake.”  

More than half the customers are Italians looking for a taste of the old country. Ready to greet the ones who don’t speak English are staff members completely fluent in the Sicilian dialect. Fabiana Cacciaguoerra, a sales clerk from the neighborhood and just returned from a trip back “home” to Sicily, confesses that when a customer speaks standard Italian, she calls on Scaduto. “They don’t understand me, and I don’t really get them either,” Cacciaguoerra says; Sicilian, she notes, “really is a different language from Italian.” But everyone is fluent in English, too, and regular “American” customers are equally welcome. The helpful staff takes time to explain what each sweet is made of. Among the favorites are Genovese pastries filled with a custard loaded with chocolate chips, and cookies flavored with almond paste, pignoli, anisette or lemon.


Patisserie St. Michel, 1389 Queen Anne Road, Teaneck, (201) 837-8140

Reinhold’s Quality Bakery, 32 Franklin Turnpike, Waldwick, (201) 652-4454

Zadies Kosher Bakery, 19-09 Fair Lawn Ave., Fair Lawn, (201) 796-6565

Sweet Avenue Bake Shop, 153 Park Ave., Rutherford, (201) 935-BAKE

Maria’s Italian Bakery, 386 Market St., Saddle Brook, (201) 843-7990

Other Bergen Bakeries of Note
La Dolce Divas Bakery44 E. Palisade Ave., Englewood (201) 871-1230
La Dolce Divas Bakery opened in spring 2008, to the delight of homemade cupcake lovers throughout the county. Owner Danielle Maschuci has temporarily left her legal career to run this bakery, along with another one that she owns in Ocean Grove. “Our cupcakes are unique, “says Maschuci, “because we bake from scratch, with all natural ingredients and no preservatives.  They’re like someone made them at home – a really good baker, that is.

B&W Bakery614 Main St., Hackensack (201) 342-5577
B&W Bakery has been a Bergen fixture since 1948. Its crumb cake is so famous that customers who move far away still crave it. “When we moved our son to college in Virginia, we met a Southern couple who were still talking about crumb cakes from B&W that they had eaten when they lived in New Jersey 20 years before,” marvels Maria Scalia of Ho-Ho-Kus. “Our son Nick brought them two cakes back after Thanksgiving his freshman year so that they could taste them again.”

Gâteaux Bakery & Café570 Piermont Road, Closter (201) 767-8585
Despite its French name, Gâteaux Bakery offers Asian treats – cookies and cakes with eye-appeal, and flavors that are delicate, understated and delicious. Each cake, whether flavored with green tea, sweet potato or red bean, is precisely decorated, and astonishingly pretty. The café itself is enormous, with a cathedral ceiling and plenty of seating where patrons can enjoy a walnut tart or chocolate chip cookie with a latte or cappuccino, while watching other customers pick up their meticulously decorated special orders.