Crystal found me.  On instagram years ago.  I’m sure her curiosity was not for my skills as a baker, as she was a top notch bread baker up at San Francisco’s world renowned Tartine Bakery.  I’m sure her curiosity was in the off kilter way I was running things.  She reached out.  I was shocked.  My garage bakery shed was a compilation of scavenged tools and equipment and I’m not sure I really knew what I was doing.  What I was doing was a little different, and perhaps that’s what caught her eye.  Crystal has a knack for progression.  For a constant forward movement. Quiet, modest and paced.  She is not hurried but direct and focused.  To look at her you might not see it right away.  She is beautiful.  She is blond.  She smiles for days.  She is quirky as an artist might be, someone who looks to paint out of the lines.  So to anyone’s first look they might not see her coming.  She is an unexpected surprise of persistence, passion and drive.  Painting clearly in the lines of her own magnificent picture.

Crystal introduced me to the baker’s world of bread.  Without her I am sure I would not know the people I know today, have the friends I have made in this industry or even the confidence to stand in a commercial kitchen with the likes of many brilliant bakers.  She never judged.  She has only ever been kind and supportive, with arms open and welcoming.

On my first trip to San Francisco to visit Crystal I slept on her one bedroom apartment floor with her cat.  She took me to Tartine and I watched and worked.  I was the ugly bread ducking among a shop full of bakery swans, all of whom performed tasks of mixing and shaping beyond my wildest dreams.  The oven was large, set on the black and white tiles of the bakery floor and Crystal managed the heft of loading loaves after loaves like a sweeping dance.  Her grit was tenacious as steam poured from the doors and loaves came out caramelized and blistered.  Her favorite practice is the art of baguette and I have come to declare her Queen of the crispy bag with pointy tips.  Her baguette is an expression of her as a creative.  Her artist signature.  The creme de la creme of her years as bread lady extraordinaire .   

A few years after we met Crystal decided to part ways with Tartine and made her way south to San Diego.  She bought a stack of lodge cast iron dutchovens, found an oven to bake out of and started up a small pop up bakery operation of her own.  With breads and pastries and persistence she found her following in the So Cal sunshine.  Her goal was a bakery of her own and her path to it was direct and unwavering.  We would talk about the ridiculous hours of a shoddy, scrappy pop up bakery operation.  Exhaustion from no sleep and underwhelming bakes with crappy equipment.  Hawking bread and pastries like fools trying to feed anything that moved.  But within that process of unprofessional baking tactics and delirious marketing mayhem you find yourself, you find your capacity.  Crystal found her bakery.

Wayfarer Bread opened in Bird Rock, San Diego in 2018.  Bread by the beach.  She found a group of investors and a well worn taco joint on the streets of La Jolla.  The listing was for a tear down.  She didn’t tear it down.  She made due. She began to build.  Piecing together what would ultimately be the quintessential bakery of anyone’s dreams.  It is small.  It is unpretentious.  It is expressive.  It is full.  It is bread wherever you look.  It is boxes of the flakiest pastry.  It is open.  It is warm.  And she’ll give you a perfect baguette with the most exquisite French butter and sea salt to top.  Her bakery is old fashioned in essence like a European bake shop but So Cal at it’s best.  How she pulled that off I don’t know.  I guess, in truth, her bakery is simply her.

It has taken me too many years to go visit.  I finally found my chance escape for a few hours while visiting Del Mar for a horse show.  While my daughter did her horse duties I slipped away and drove the thirty minutes to La Jolla.  The small shop is painted in passion fruit.  Murals and vines alike.  You walk in through the door to a bustling small retail space and pastry counter.  Crystal greets me with an enormous hug and we immediately sit down at what appears to be her cafe table office space surrounded by bread and boxes.  She gets me a bottle of sparkle, a chocolate croissant, a savory tart, a baguette, a whole two pounds of butter and a small precious avocado.  Her husband farms avocados so she is never without.  And we start talking, rapid fire, leaving nothing out.

We talk about life first.  We are mothers.  We have one kid each.  Mine is a teenager and hers is in the wee years of potty training.  She is a bread baker but also the bread winner and adding motherhood to a full time career is a feat of extraordinary strength, endurance and patience.  She worries she is dropping the ball somewhere as there maybe isn’t enough of her to go around.  But she isn’t.  It is clearly apparent that she is managing, if not completely excelling at her job as “woman of the year”.  She says she doesn’t get to bake as much as she would like to.  The business aspects of the bakery take her time, but she misses making the bread.

She takes me through the kitchen, to a table of sandwiches being assembled.  We always talk beach sandwiches and the perfection of the pairing.  Sand wiches on sand beaches.  It is perfection of the absurd.  Through the small door, the storage room and into the back garden.  She shows me her favorite place.  It is the alley and this is where I find our true kinship.  As bakers, we find our peaceful place.  Among the chaos, and crazy hours we often find this peace in back alleys, hidden corners, next to dumpsters.  We find the flowers if we can, a view of the trees and if we are lucky some sunshine and soft breeze.  There is, at the core of a bread baker, an artist.

Together we can talk about anything.  We can talk as women, as intellects and creatives, as mothers, as business owners, as bread ladies.  Our experience and years of knowing one another is true comfort, companionship, as the word means figuratively and literally breaking bread together.  And although we don’t see much of each other, I am grateful for this friendship.  As a bread baker our job is to welcome you to our hearth.  Crystal has done that for many, for me, with open arms, loaves of the best warm bread, watermelon and sunflowers as tall as the sky.