Three of us have run this shop. Two of us are still arguing about the sernik.
Halina Wróbel opened on Caniff Street in 1961. Her son Tadeusz took it in 1988. Marta, his daughter, has had it since 2014.
What has and has not changed.
Hamtramck was Polish, then it was Polish and Bangladeshi and Yemeni, and now it is all of that at once. The shop has served every version of the street it has stood on.
The starter is older than the building’s current roof.
Halina carried a jar of rye starter from Rzeszów in 1961 and it has been fed every day since. Not as a story for a website — it is simply how the rye is made, and if it died we would have to start again with something worse. Marta takes a jar home at Christmas in case the shop burns down.
On Fat Tuesday we make nine thousand pączki and sell out by two.
Pączki Day in Hamtramck is a real thing and it does not care whether you are ready. The line starts before five in the morning, it goes round the corner onto Caniff, and the police close the block. We bake from midnight. Tadeusz still comes in for it, and he is eighty-one.
We shut on Mondays and we will not be talked out of it.
Six days is enough. The ovens get cleaned, the starter gets a quiet day, and everybody who works here gets one morning that does not begin at four. Every year somebody suggests opening seven days. Every year the answer is no.
Nothing here is baked anywhere else.
No central kitchen, no par-baked trays trucked in overnight, no second location. One room behind that counter, one set of ovens, four people. It is the reason we only make eight things, and the reason we run out.
Come on a Tuesday morning.
Saturday is busy and loud and the good rye is gone by nine. Tuesday at about ten is the shop at its best: everything out, nobody queuing, and somebody will probably give you a corner of something to try.
Photograph credits
All ten photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are cropped square and graded to one matte treatment. They are of real baked goods, but not of this fictional shop.
babka by Joy (CC BY 2.0) · buns by W.carter (CC0) · challah by Aviv Hod (CC BY 3.0) · counter by Kurt Kaiser (CC0) · darkrye by Glane23 (CC BY-SA 3.0) · loaves by Drew Coffman drewcoffman (CC0) · makowiec by Betsy Weber (CC BY 2.0) · paczki by Brassluff (CC0) · rye by Wu (CC BY 2.0) · sernik by Jacek Halicki (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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