A Dream Slowly Rising

The sisters call it La Maison du Pain, or House of Bread, a perfectly sensible name for the pretty storefront bakery they opened amid the car body shops on Pico Boulevard, a few miles west of downtown.

Had Carmen Salindong and Josephine Santos instead chosen the name La Maison des Reves, or House of Dreams, it would have been an equally clear and honest statement of what’s inside: The dreams of two immigrant sisters, the oldest of eight children, tired of their successful careers working for other people. The dreams of a young apprentice baker from France. Even the dreams of a neighborhood.

But dreams can be outlandish things.

“Audacious” would not be overdoing it to describe a plan for a serious French bakery cooked up by two Filipino American women with no training.

As Salindong and Santos have said, using precisely the same words: “We are not even bread eaters. We are rice eaters.”

But their dream had been growing, rising like bread, until it could not be ignored. It was, perhaps, their midlife crisis, a time when they asked, “Is that all there is?”

“I’ve been in my suit and nylons for a long time,” said Salindong, a law firm administrator who turned 50 in May and now goes to work in jeans and Vans sneakers, though she still wears elegant hoop earrings.

“We loved our bosses, but it was time to go,” adds Santos, 51, who for 20 years was the bookkeeper at L’Orangerie and who has dreamed of owning a bakery since she worked in a pizza shop as a teenager in the Philippines.

Three years ago, the sisters went to Paris with 17 other relatives; this is a family that likes to be together. Salindong and Santos were smitten by what they encountered all over Paris: people lining up as early as 6 a.m. at their neighborhood bakeries.

Back in L.A., they couldn’t get the image out of their heads. So they began looking around for a building. Finally, they saw one in a Mid-City neighborhood where the homes may be roomy or run-down, where Pico Boulevard is often litter-strewn, where car repair shops ringed with barbed wire and liquor stores dominate but where cafes and galleries are popping up.

It seemed perfect, with room for the bakery and offices. Salindong’s husband, Conrad, could move his 13-year-old dental lab business to the second floor. “The building was what really told me, ‘Here I am, do this,’ ” Carmen Salindong said.

In April 2004, the sisters signed a five-year lease with two options to renew, pouring in their life savings and using the equity in both of their homes. Salindong quit her job six months later, and Santos quit hers the next June.

They found asbestos floor tiles, no plumbing, a falling ceiling, poor air conditioning. The sisters had to have a new utility pole installed. They needed a new gas valve. They stripped some walls, sandblasted a wall and added a glass storefront.

“I started complaining about all I had to do, and then I remembered this was my idea,” Salindong said.

They sampled baguettes all over Los Angeles.

They imported top-notch ovens and other equipment from France, learning from the company representatives how to use them. They bought enormous stand mixers, a dough-cutting machine, deep rack ovens and a convection oven 7 feet tall.

They learned to make croissants and baguettes from books, giving samples to carpenters, contractors, friends and family.

They had plenty of doubters.

“Everyone was pessimistic,” Salindong said. “Even the builder, even my own architect didn’t imagine how it would be. When we were doing it, they were all shaking their heads.”

Take the stainless steel-and-glass pastry display cases, which Salindong designed with perhaps more taste than expertise. So awkward to clean that she needs help to reach all the corners, they resemble jewelry store cases.

“What I put in them is my jewel,” Salindong said.

Their family became their backbone. Salindong’s older daughter Carly, a UCLA student, designed the logo and helped her mother design the frosted-glass window behind the bakery counter. Two tables were borrowed from the family matriarch.

“Everyone has put something into this,” Carly said, explaining that she and her cousins -- and some of their friends -- worked without pay all summer. Her grandmother did the wash and cooked meals for her weary family. Brothers, cousins, children: All were called on for a school pickup or a bread delivery.

Santos and Salindong were the first of eight children and the first, at 26 and 25, to leave Quezon City in the Philippines for the United States. They sent for their siblings, two at a time, and their parents. All but one made the move permanently.

They did not have to send for the young man who loved Carmen. Conrad Salindong arrived on a student visa. “She emigrated and I had to follow. I gave up everything,” he said, not unhappily.

Here he goes again.

At 8 a.m. last Aug. 6, La Maison du Pain opened to the public.

What public there was. For the first few weeks, the sisters had a few orders from cafes and shops, the orders they said must be the bulk of their business. A few people walked in, perhaps drawn by a makeshift sign on the sidewalk.

They had no coffeemaker, no sign on the building. Sometimes they didn’t make enough bread; sometimes the customers didn’t have enough money. Or just a credit card, which the bakery did not yet accept. Salindong, who runs the front of the bakery, usually let them take what they wanted, hoping they’d return.

The dream was being tested and sometimes found wanting.

In September, they baked 60 baguettes a day. At $1.40 each, that wasn’t a lot of dough going out or coming in.

Salindong and Santos, who lives with their mother, took out second mortgages on their homes. Salindong told her daughter that money for graduate school might be tough to come by.

And in October, they sold a four-unit apartment building they owned on Venice Boulevard. Salindong bemoaned that the closing was delayed by Columbus Day, so it took an extra day to clear funds needed to pay bills.

Salindong figured they’ve spent more than $1 million.

“My husband kept saying, ‘You’re spending so much money.’ But we’re doing it right. It’s going to come back,” Salindong said.

Yet at one point, Salindong worried aloud that she could lose her house and joked about putting beds on the second floor of the bakery. At least her family would eat.

“I talk to my house,” Salindong said. “I say, ‘Hang on, we haven’t forgotten you. We won’t let you down.’ ”

Conrad Salindong seems in awe of the risk, so many years after he started over in the United States, after he and his family had made it. Their house in a good neighborhood. One daughter at UCLA, the second at Immaculate Heart. His own dental lab business.

“Everything is here,” he said softly, standing in the kitchen. “Our life savings.”

The bakery found some early fans, among them Rene Averseng, owner of Du Vin Wine & Spirits in West Hollywood.

“The smell is absolutely wonderful,” said Averseng, a French native who decided to sell the sisters’ baguettes in his shop.

A few at a time, neighborhood residents stop by.

It’s hard to just buy bread at La Maison du Pain. Salindong will ask about your mother or your dog or how you liked what you bought last time. Next time you shop, she’ll remember.

Brenda Black was among the first customers. She told the sisters they needed a sign, and when Salindong said they had no money for one, she took out her checkbook, an offer Salindong turned down.

“I was just hoping that everyone would come, and we would keep the bakery,” Black said.

Melissa Patrick, who lives a few blocks away, said she and her husband, Michael, were “sort of stalking” the bakery in anticipation of its opening.

“We’ve been looking for places on this stretch of Pico to go to at night, things that make it a neighborhood,” Patrick said.

Consuelo Gomez became more than a customer. She has lived in the neighborhood for 18 years and is active in the Pico Revitalization Project, a group that wants to see more people out on Pico, doing business, shopping, eating. She sent hundreds of e-mails to spread the word about La Maison du Pain.

When the windows were tagged one night, a customer showed Salindong how to scrape the paint with a razor.

The bakery picked up a steady, if small, wholesale trade. Salindong complains she has too little time to take samples to entice new customers. Her confidence, however, grows.

She keeps the cases stocked, placing the croissants and Danish -- apple, apricot, blueberry, raisin and others -- precisely on metal trays. Six to a large tray, three to a small one.

In an adjacent kitchen, her sister is at work, learning as she goes. The shelves have not only “Professional Baking” by the Cordon Bleu in Paris but also two Martha Stewart books.

“Everyone tells me you just have one chance,” said Santos, who drinks her coffee with lots of sugar and takes occasional cigarette breaks.

But, asked Salindong, “If it takes her half a day to bake one cake, how can we make it?”

One of their most influential advisors is Santos’ former boss, Gerard Ferry, owner of L’Orangerie, who said he is impressed but added that he expects they’ll face some hard times.

“Consistency and quality of their products and consistency and quality of their delivery: Those are the two issues you face,” he said.

Ferry told the sisters they needed someone with professional training. “Mr. Ferry wants a real baker.... He is right,” Santos said.

Salindong and Santos had contacted a pastry chef in France and began processing paperwork for him to move to L.A. Meanwhile, he referred them to Charles Cherentin, just 21 and an apprentice baker in a resort town in Brittany, who could help them improve their breads.

On Oct. 3, he arrived at LAX with two bags: one holding recipes and one holding a few clothes, including just one pair of pants.

“I said, ‘I can’t blame you. When I came here I had one suitcase,’ ” Salindong said.

When Cherentin said he had to call his mother to let her know he arrived safely, the sisters realized they had more than an advisor. “We realized we had a new son,” Santos said.

At first, Cherentin stayed with one of Salindong and Santos’ sisters, who drove him to the bakery at 2 a.m. Some of the younger generation took him to the beach.

Cherentin’s arrival marked a change for La Maison du Pain.

He has experience in a bakery that turned out 1,200 baguettes a day. And after a few days of experimenting with American flours, he took charge of the breads; the taste and consistency improved, the variety and volume increased.

Cherentin worked fast, drinking Coca-Cola and taking occasional breaks for a Gauloise, later a Marlboro.

He taught some techniques to Juan Dominguez, who had been gardening and doing odd jobs for Salindong and Santos’ mother until he was enlisted in the bakery effort.

When Salindong joked that she would make Cherentin famous, he didn’t laugh too hard.

English, Tagalog, Spanish, French are spoken.

One morning, a bread order was overlooked because it was on the wall only in English. But when bakery equipment gives them trouble, Cherentin calls the French company to work it out.

A cafe nearby takes 18 Danish in the mornings. Deliveries go to Westwood, the Valley and Hollywood. At the end of one day in October, there’s $300 in the cash register.

Soon, the sisters learned what it means to be careful what you wish for. Columbus Day, Oct. 10, could be the last low-key day for some time at La Maison du Pain.

It was the day before their first big delivery -- 500 rosemary rolls for the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel.

A lot rode on these rolls; if the Regent’s chef was pleased, there would be more orders and perhaps recommendations to colleagues.

Santos and Cherentin were at the bakery shortly after 5 a.m., the last day work at the bakery has begun so late. In the smaller of two kitchens, where Santos generally works, she measured dough for croissants. Making them is a three-day process, from mixing dough to letting it rest, folding in butter -- lots of butter -- cutting and freezing and baking.

At 2 minutes to 7, the sign went onto the sidewalk. Santos went out for a smoke as daylight brought traffic and noise to the neighborhood. Across the street, heavy security gates still covered Hair Master and Complete Auto Body and Paint.

At 7:15, Santos was ready to bake the day’s Danish pastries, but the dough did not have quite the right feel; it was a little tacky, she thought. It was late, 7:30, when she put them into the convection oven.

She made the sign of the cross. “I will pray what comes out,” she said.

Salindong, who arrived after dropping her younger daughter at school, tied on a white cotton apron, folded at her waist.

The Regent was on everyone’s mind. Cherentin started work at midnight to make sure the order was ready.

“It’s scary, scary. Really,” Santos said. Looking at Cherentin, she added, “I get my strength from the young ones. It’s better to be with them, the young ones with no fear.”

“When we had nothing, we worried,” Salindong said. “Now we can’t sleep either.”

The next day, Salindong and Santos counted and bagged the rolls and delivered them to the Regent in their “raggedy” blue Volvo station wagon. Hours later, back at the bakery, they got the verdict: Not only were the rolls a hit, the sisters got orders for the rest of the week.

“We were like, ‘Oh, my God. We’ll be rolling dough all night,’ ” Salindong said.

They called in reinforcements: Conrad Salindong and four nephews. “Josephine told them, ‘I don’t care if you are sleeping. We need you.’ ”

Conny Andersson, executive chef at the Regent, decreed the flavor to be good, the texture light and appealing. The shapes are not always spot on, but that’s OK.

“I love the fact that they did it, that they had the guts,” Andersson said.

Not quite three months after La Maison du Pain opened, permanent signs went up on the building.

Inside, two full wire racks beckon with baguettes, breadstick-thin ficelle, olive bread, and rosemary, brioche and dinner rolls. The newest was a country baguette, marked in flour with a swirly HB, for house bread.

“This baguette is good,” Cherentin said in English that had noticeably improved in just three weeks. “If the people want a real French bread, I think it’s this.”

On a recent Saturday, the busiest day in the shop, La Maison du Pain was full of people behind the counter, most of them working for bread, not money.

Carly Salindong was at the register. In the kitchen, Cherentin shaped some of the 1,200 rolls for the Regent. Friends and relatives placed pastries in the cases and helped with a delivery.

Juan Dominguez returned to Mexico, so the sisters hired his brother, Gustavo. Cherentin had help from Conrad Salindong, who sometimes shows up at 3 a.m.

Cherentin soon will return to France but will apply for a work permit to return.

There’s still no line of customers at 6 a.m. And more baking racks are needed before large new orders can be accepted. The coffeemaker sits next to the display cases, but it cannot be hooked up until a plumber installs a drainpipe.

A customer notices the coffeemaker. “It’s a good thing to see. You’re getting closer.”

Closer, yes. Still a dream, but closer.