Joe Schuver has laid down his rolling pin “and is taking a well-deserved rest.”
After 25 years, the owner of Destination Bakery at 598 Chenery Street has sold his last, flaky Danish and closed the businesses.
“I’m sad but I’m also happy,” said Schuver, 71. “It was time.”
He has hopes that the space will continue to be a bakery. “I’ve already gotten three calls from people who may be looking to open something in the neighborhood,” he told the Glen Park News. “I’m hoping someone will open bakery.”
Schuver has the space until the end of January and says he’ll be clearing things out after Christmas. He has a good relationship with the building’s owner, who lives in the South Bay. He’s hoping he’ll be able to sell the baking equipment and fixtures to the next business that moves in.
“They’ll be able to have a fresh start.”
A neighborhood anchor
Schuver has been working in that flour-filled space for 38 years. “That building is in my blood.”
He worked at Creighton’s for 13 years, on and off, he said of the bakery that previously operated in the space.
He’d long told the bakery owners that if they ever decided to retire, to let him know. Finally, one day, they did.
“We opened as Destination the Tuesday after Labor Day in 2000.”
Glen Park, he said, “is a great neighborhood. People really get the concept of a small business.”
Schuver says he’s grateful for the support he’s gotten and is going to miss the customers and the neighborhood the most. “I keep bumping into people on the street who want to talk. I was just having coffee in a different neighborhood and a woman came up to me and said ‘Oh my God, I know you’ We miss you so much.”
But they also tell him he looks good. “I say, ‘I’m not getting up at 3:30 in the morning and I’m not stressed out.’”
Stalwart employees
“My employees have been holding me up the past couple of years,” Schuver said.
In a note he posted on the bakery door the day he closed, he wrote “Gratitude in full measure goes to the hard-working employees of Destination Baking.”
“Maria, whose grit and determination was the glue that held the business together for 22+ years. Her loyalty and dedicated has been invaluable.” Filling her shoes would have required hiring three people, he said.
She did prep for the next morning’s baking, helping weigh out everything, getting all the ingredients ready so “it was like putting a puzzle together for me,” he said.
His baking assistant Ana, a recent hire, was “a bright light of cheerfulness.”
Indy, who worked the counter on the Saturday, was “the professional, warm and calming presence whenever she was here.”
Indy used to work at the Cheese Boutique, making her a long-time presence on the block even before she began her eight years at Destination.. She also held down a full-time job in healthcare, showing how hard it is to make ends meet in San Francisco.
Schuver is also grateful for the 20 plus years he worked with long-time counter person Deb Lunsford. Illness meant she hadn’t been able to work since summer but she was a huge part of the team during Destination’s history.
A circuitous route to a great career
Schuver was born in a tiny town called Granville in “the great state of Iowa,” he said.
It’s one of the reasons he’s always preferred fruit to chocolate. “I grew up on a farm and we had apples and pears and plum trees and all kinds of berries. So dessert-wise, fruit is my calling card.”
His high school graduating class had 28 students. He then attended Loras College in Dubuque. The tiny Catholic college has about 1,200 students.
To help pay for school, he got a job working in a bakery, something he’s grown up loving.
“My mother and grandmother that just baked constantly. I never had bread from the store until I went to college. It was farmland, so people ate a huge lunch, there was always meat and potatoes and salad and pie. I always like it I helped my mom when I was little,” he said.
He got his first job baking at age 19. A friend at Loras was running a summer youth program for high school students and one day when Schuver was visiting her, she told him “There’s this guy who keeps calling and begging for workers, he needs a weekend baker.”
None of the high school students wanted to work baker’s hours, so Schuver took the job.
After graduation he taught high school English for four years, then went to the University of Iowa and got a Master’s degree in library science. He’d hoped to become a librarian, but he graduated into a recession and the governor froze most state jobs
Schuver had been working part-time as a baker at a small French bakery in Iowa City, where he learned all about making laminated pastries like Danishes and croissant as well as baguette. When he realized he wouldn’t be able to get a job as a librarian, he went full -time as a baker and never looked back.
“A lot of it was so foreign to me, a kid raised on meat and potatoes and pies. There was food I’d never been exposed to before, it was eye-opening for a country boy.”
There’s just something about baking
Working baker’s hours are no joke. Schuver started at Destination every morning by 4:30 am. He’d get the day’s baking done by 9:30 or so and then go home and take a break and each lunch.
“Then I’d go back from about 1:00 to 4:00 or 5:00, he said. “So it was a split shift.”
Still, he loved it. “Up until the last year, when the alarm went off I’d jump out of bed and say , ‘OK, time to go do this.’”
Even the days it was hard to go out into the cold to go to work, it didn’t last long.
“That feeling always vanished as soon as I walked into the room,” he said. “There’s something magical about walking into a cold room and nothing’s ready and three hours later there’s hundreds and hundreds of pastries and the racks are all full. I never lost my wonder at that.”
He also never stopped learning or working on his recipes.
“Martha Stewart says to learn something new every day,” he said. “A few years back I started to look at the techniques we used and the recipes I’d been doing forever and I thought, ‘I should tweak this a little bit, do it better. The last few years, we tightened things up and I was really proud of what we were making.”
“As far as quality, we really went out on top.”
Some quality time at home
Schuver is looking forward to some quality time at home with his husband of 38 years, Wil. They met in Boston, where Schuver was working at the time.
“I was working for a big caterer and he was traveling on businesses,” he said. “We had this whirlwind romance. He said, ‘Why don’t you come out to California?’ but I liked Boston. But then the next couple of winters were brutal and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll give it a try.’ And I’ve been here ever since.”
Being at home has been a treat. “He’s happy to have me around. I’m cooking dinner every night and I’m not walking around like a zombie because I have to get up at 3:00 am.”
He misses the people and the neighborhood, and the work. “I love making Danish pastries,” he said. “They’re elegant.”
The one thing he won’t miss is scones.
“I’m not so into scones. But people love them. When I was working in the bakery, it was always the last prep work I would do in the afternoon to get them ready for baking in the morning. And if it’s 4:30 pm and you haven’t made the scones yet, you were going to have some really unhappy customers.”