I’ve driven by the Helms Bakery complex in Culver City hundreds of times. The sign boasting the official bread of the 1932 Olympics still stands tall over the building. But for the first time since the bakery shut its doors in 1969, loaves of bread are rising again at Helms.
Sang Yoon, the chef behind Father’s Office, opened a reimagined version of the bakery in the Helms complex, right across from his gastropub and down the way from his now-closed modern Southeast Asian restaurant Lukshon, which reached No. 3 on the Times’ 101 Best Restaurants in L.A. list of 2016. The bakery project, which Yoon says he’s been dreaming about for over a decade, finally came to life on Friday morning.
“Mentally it’s been 12 years in the making,” says Yoon, walking around the bakery. “Construction lasted about two years. It’s kind of a cool thing there is a Helms Bakery now. For another generation.”
If you’re in a certain age bracket, you may remember seeing the delivery trucks driving around Los Angeles. While Yoon doesn’t plan to have a wholesale business or bring back the yellow-and-blue trucks, he did build out a 14,000-square-foot space that includes separate areas to house a coffee bar, kitchen, downstairs bakery, upstairs dough room and a large center market area with cold and hot prepared foods and an elite selection of snacks.
Every couple of minutes, the entire room turns its attention to a flipboard on the back wall. It flutters to life, then displays the day’s specials, fun facts about Helms and what’s coming up next in the bakery.
Attached to the market is Dinette, a sit-down restaurant and bar that Yoon plans to open next year. But there’s plenty to be excited about now. Here’s a highly specific rundown of 13 of my favorites:
1. The bread and stuff that goes with bread
Baker Jacob Fraijo, who previously worked for the restaurants Bouchon and Robuchon and chef Dominque Crenn, is making 10 to 12 varieties of bread each day, including loaves of pain de mie, country bread baked as a Pullman loaf, soft pretzels and baguettes.
“I really like the pain de mie loaf bread that we’re making,” Fraijo says. “I feel like people don’t associate those breads with high quality or being artisan-focused, but it really is. We approach it with the same intensity and focus as our croissants.”
“It has to do with Helms’ history, the idea of making very high-quality soft bread,” Yoon adds. “I love the idea of having a loaf of bread at home.”
Underneath the day’s selection of bread is an area of the store Yoon calls “stuff that goes with bread,” where you’ll find everything you might need to build a cheese and charcuterie board. There’s also an area that houses tubs of garlic butter. Nearly black in color, the butter is crowded with chunks of roasted garlic and what tastes like sweet black garlic. It’s just the thing to slather onto Fraijo’s demi baguette filled with Toma cheese.
2. Deli sandwiches made on bread baked 20 steps away
The prepared food section is filled with cold sandwiches, wraps and kimbap. Executive chef Nanor Harboyan, who used to cook at Destroyer, loves that the bread for the sandwiches is made just feet away, in the large open bakery at the back of the building. Guests can peek in throughout the day to see what’s coming out of the oven.
The egg salad is served on pain de mie. Turkey comes on the sliced country loaf. I’m partial to the shaved mortadella on a demi baguette with lots of crushed pistachios.
3. Breakfast
During morning hours, the hot bar is stocked with breakfast burritos, sandwiches and plates. If you have the time to linger, grab the plate and eat it on the sunny patio out front. The biscuit is warm and flaky, the scrambled eggs fluffy, and there’s a cup of syrup to dip the sausage and bacon.
4. Doughnuts
It’s impossible to know what doughnuts will be available when you visit. All areas of the bakery will evolve throughout the day. What’s there in the morning may not be there in the afternoon, and many of the items are seasonal. But if you see a passion fruit cruller in the pastry case, grab it. As far as crullers go, it’s a textbook-perfect doughnut, with a crisp, twisted crust and a soft and chewy middle. It’s coated in a sweet passion fruit icing and covered in toasted coconut shavings.
5. Carrot salad
Is it odd to recommend a carrot salad? Maybe, but it’s my favorite salad in the cold case, which is full of big white bowls brimming with corn and poblano salad, gochujang cauliflower and potatoes with dill. Harboyan wanted to include dishes inspired by her Middle Eastern heritage, and the carrot salad is one of them. She tosses carrot ribbons in a tahini dressing with crunchy cashews and sesame seeds and squares of daikon.
6. All that cake and pie
When Harboyan joined the team six months ago, the first thing she worked on was the pie. To create the specific straight, deep-dish cherry pie Yoon had in his mind, Harboyan worked with Lloyd Pans in Washington state to create a custom pie tin. Fashioned of aluminum with a special nonstick coating, the pan conducts heat in a way that lets the bakers turn out a perfect golden crust. The shape of the tin also allows for an abundant amount of filling. Each of the slices overflows with sweet cherries.
The corn and honey cake is similar to your favorite corn bread, dense, gritty and full of corn flavor drenched in honey. It could be breakfast. It could be dessert.
Slab cakes are cut into neat triangles you can eat in your car (a la car cake). The yuzu and ginger slice layers fluffy, stark white cake with sharp lemon curd and candied ginger.
7. The melts
I’m not sure that you could accurately categorize the pastrami sandwich as a melt, but it’s close. Harboyan and Yoon created a Korean Russian dressing that packs a hot mustard kick; it’s brushed on top of chopped pastrami, sauerkraut and Swiss cheese. The sandwich is heated on the flattop until the bread is shiny and toasted.
The patty melt is an actual melt, with a loose patty of ground beef and chopped onions, American cheese and extra dill-y pickles. It’s on par with the burger Yoon is making across the way at Father’s Office.
8. Chicken wings
The hot bar boasts a selection of vegetable sides and whole Costco-style rotisserie chickens in paper bags, fried chicken, meatloaf and fillets of salmon. The chicken wings could be the best of the bunch, with crisp skin lacquered in a sweet and spicy brown sugar glaze.
9. Hot dogs, sort of
Fraijo’s viennoiserie covers all forms of laminated dough, with a variety of croissants and hand pies. His greatest feat may be the hot dog, a thick sausage wrapped in flaky croissant dough covered in everything bagel seasoning. It shatters like a good croissant. It’s better than a pretzel dog. It’s better than a hot dog. It’s better than you’re imagining.
10. Dole Whip
There are certain food rules I believe every Angeleno should follow. Eating Dole Whip, the whipped pineapple soft serve that originated at Disney World in the mid-1980s, is one of them. For years, you couldn’t find it beyond the gates of Disneyland. While it’s now available at a handful of places outside the theme parks, it’s still a rare sight to see.
Yoon is serving swirls of Dole Whip at the coffee bar.
11. Thrifty ice cream
Pints of Thrifty ice cream are available in the freezer section of the market. There’s a variety of flavors, including the undisputed best flavor, Chocolate Malted Krunch.
12. Pet toys
In the marketplace, there’s an impressive array of plush toys with baguettes, French fries and hot dogs for your pets to gnaw on to their heart’s content. If you need a bag of duck heart treats, you’ll find those too.
13. Food candles
I don’t know that I’ve seen a better selection of candles that look like food in any of the other superettes around town. Blush-colored heirloom tomatoes, pebble-skinned avocados, jars of bear honey, bulbs of garlic, artichokes, corn on the cob, accurately sized raspberries and pasta shapes are all reimagined in wax but look like the real thing.
Though the number of items in the bakery and market must already be nearing 1000, Yoon is just getting started. And I didn’t even get into the Sprite Tic Tacs and peach-flavored Oreos.
He plans to eventually introduce a Helms heritage line with items re-created from the original bakery.
“It’s not going to be a continuation of what they had, but I hope that people who had it remember the joy they had and not necessarily the product,” he says. “Even though it’s a completely different experience, I hope that kids will run in here and have an equally awesome experience that they will remember for their whole lives.”
Now that you know what to get, here’s where to go
Helms Bakery, 3280 Helms Ave, Culver City, (310) 204-1865, helmsbakerydistrict.com