By Ethan D’Amato
Here’s a prediction: Bub and Grandma’s, the bakery/deli restaurant that opened last month in Glassell Park, will become a neighborhood mainstay, the kind of place that Northeast L.A. wouldn’t be the same without.
The restaurant is a dream come true for its founder, the baker and entrepreneur Andrew Kadin, who started the Bub and Grandma’s wholesale bakery in 2015. The restaurant menu features breakfast and lunch sandwiches, toasts and pastries, salads and sides, but those categories don’t do the offerings justice. The choices range from basic (Italian sub) to unique (Ham Royale), from carnivorous to omnivorous, vegetarian and vegan. The bread is everything Bub and Grandma’s is known for – house sourdough, cinnamon raisin, spelt polenta, to name just a few varieties.
There’s in-house roasted coffee and beer and wine, too.
The restaurant’s opening in September and the community response were emotional for Kadin –“far beyond anything I could have imagined,” he said recently. It had taken three years of setbacks and heartache to get to that moment, including problems with investors and contractors stemming from the Covid-19 lockdown.
“It was just excruciating,” Kadin said. “That was an unfortunate three-year absurdity, one cosmic joke after another.”
So when Bub and Grandma’s doors finally opened, “I was just crying all over the place. Kadin said. “When that signboard went up outside, it was like the last puzzle piece that went in after three years, and I let myself feel those emotions.”
Kadin’s team includes head chef Zach Jarrett, who previously worked at Sqirl in East Hollywood, and head pastry chef Christopher Lier, who was instrumental in growing Bub and Grandma’s wholesale bakery business.
Lier, Jarrett and the other people who make Bub and Grandma’s run are the “ultimate group of human beings,” says Kadin.
Bub and Grandma’s | 3507 Eagle Rock Blvd. | Mon.-Sat. 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. | bubandgrandmas.com
Ethan D’Amato, a sophomore at Occidental College, is a participant in the NELA Neighborhood Reporting Partnership, a collaboration of the Boulevard Sentinel and The Occidental campus newspaper.
