Roll With It

In the wake of Katrina, a Midd alum seeks to lend a little bit of normalcy to the Big Easy.

By Jessica Thomson '00

Hillary Guttman '00 isn't sure how many muffins she had baked before she had earned enough money to complete renovations on her dream project and open Laurel Street Bakery to the public, in the summer of 2005.

She just knows that it took a lot of muffins—and bread and pastries and various other goodies—made for wholesale clients in the commercial kitchen of the bakery she purchased in early 2004 in her native New Orleans. She knows that she spent more than a year baking during the day in order to earn enough capital to fully renovate the front of the store, work that took place during the night, while the ovens in back cooled.

"At first, I put everything the bakery earned, including my salary, directly back into renovations," recalls Hillary. "The day we opened the front for retail, I had less than $100 in the bank."

Yet her depleted bank account was far from her mind when she opened the doors to Laurel Street Bakery—located just off Magazine Street in the city's Uptown district—for retail business. No, she was ebullient, thrilled that her dream had taken shape and become a reality. It was sunny and very hot that day with temperatures in the mid-90s, but that didn't stop the crowds from descending on the bakery.

It was August 9, 2005.

Three weeks later, Hurricane Katrina devastated her city.

"I had heard mutterings of a hurricane that Saturday morning, but was so consumed by the bakery that I really didn't give it much thought," says Hillary. Her landlord assured her that boarding up the building would harm the brick faÁade more than help it, so Hillary and her mother stacked up the furniture and locked up. "There was nothing to do then but hope it went the other way."

As it turns out, Hillary was fortunate. The bakery remained intact and she was able to return to New Orleans one month after the storm. Except for water damage and about six thousand dollars' worth of spoiled food, Laurel Street Bakery just needed a few days of serious cleaning.

Still, Hillary couldn't solve the challenge of reopening on her own. She needed supplies, which were nearly impossible to come by; most delivery trucks were stolen, looted, or reassigned to FEMA. (An empty local grocery store was open, with a sign that read, "Take what you need.") She needed electricity. She needed clean water. And, of course, she needed customers.

Hillary remembers how the waiting game began. "I drove around the city to all of my old wholesale clients to see their damage, and no one was around, not one person. So my entire wholesale business, which I'd depended on for money, was gone."

The days crawled by as Hillary cleaned up the bakery and recruited employees. She applied for small business loans and laughed at the fact that the 14-page loan application would take three months to process.

Though she always had a thing for coffee shops, Hillary's dream of actually opening a bakery was relatively new. She had double majored in biology and studio art (an odd combination, she admits, but it balanced her interest in both tangible results and unstructured creativity) and was enrolled in a doctoral program in neuroscience at the University of Texas, when the bakery bug bit in 2002. Her daily academic routine wasn't satisfying her creative side, so she had picked up work at an Austin bakery. When she realized that she was enjoying her time baking more than her time in the lab, Hillary left graduate school and began baking full time.

She returned to her hometown, where she felt that if she combined the atmosphere of the city's best coffee shops with just-out-of-the-oven cinnamon rolls made by the same person whose smile greeted you at the door, the customers would come. And then came Katrina, and with the future of her fledgling enterprise in doubt, she wondered whether she'd have to start over again.

Eventually, the electricity came on. A few food purveyors began operating skeleton crews supplying grocery stores, and she was first in line for flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and coffee. Though she was short on money, she did have determination and a stream of curious people passing by each day. Hillary reopened Laurel Street Bakery immediately after the city declared the water safe to drink.

That day, one man told Hillary's mother that the bakery was the only space in the entire city that made sense.

"I think he was right," says Hillary. "It was such chaos and destruction everywhere you turned. The median of every road was filled with trash. Every house had a rotting refrigerator out front. People were—and still are—sleeping on the streets. The bakery was simple and nice."

For a few days, Laurel Street Bakery was the only place in the Uptown area selling coffee. The people came, and they haven't stopped since. Hillary still marvels at how quickly she went from feeling unsure that anyone would walk in her door again to realizing she was the only show in town.

Though her customer base is now strong, the day-to-day challenges of running a business in a ravaged city have not subsided. She still hasn't heard back about her loan applications. Electricity is patchy, which means she's constantly fighting dying ovens and refrigerators. Contractors are scarce, so the gaping hole in her bathroom wall will have to wait. Trash collection is unreliable, and recycling services are nonexistent.

Many of New Orleans's larger bakeries and restaurants had business-interruption insurance, meaning that while Hillary had to swallow her losses and open immediately to recoup all she could, others could stay closed without losing money. As of midwinter, her competitors were just beginning to reopen.

Now, Hillary is waiting again, this time to see what happens. "We were there for [the customers] when they came back to New Orleans," says Hillary. "We hope they'll be loyal to us. When all the larger coffee shops were taking their time, we were working 80 hours a week so our customers had a place to go. The people of New Orleans don't forget things like that."

At Laurel Street Bakery, running a business isn't just about making cinnamon rolls. It's about adjusting from a small wholesale bakery to a booming retail bakery, almost overnight. It's about working hard enough to grow a business in rocky soil without losing sight of how much one enjoys baking. It's about creating an atmosphere that people love visiting.

And, in the end, it's about doing what Hillary's customers call "community service" when their community needs it most.

And the cinnamon rolls are delicious.