Superstar Tastemaker Avery Ruzicka of Manresa Bread
If there was ever a story about young wanderlust, adventure and following your heart, Avery Ruzicka qualifies. Today, you know her name as two-time James Beard Foundation award nominee and founder of Manresa Bread. But what set her on that path was a combination of true passion, steadfast effort and dedication, plus a sprinkle of luck.
Ruzicka grew up in North Carolina and then moved to New York after college to attend the International Culinary Institute (ICI), which at the time was known as the French Culinary Institute. So obviously by then a love of food was a decided vision. But a gap year in France, plus many travels in other countries where bread is extolled, really set the stage for what would become her career.
At the time she thought she wanted to be a food writer. Her time in France, and then returning home to work two different restaurant jobs back to back in double shifts, was a way to train for this. Instead, she ended up falling in love with the kitchen.
New York held further inspiration from technical training while staging at Per Se and Bouchon to completing two degrees at ICI, a Culinary Degree and the Bread Program.
“Being with the people there, seeing their focus and how they managed teams,” really helped show her the world she was entering.
And this is where the bit of meant-to-be magic comes in. Ruzicka recalls being at school, in classroom kitchens filled mostly with French chefs. Enter Chef David Kinch, in torn jeans, roasting strawberries and prepping ingredients in the room where she was taking class. “I was intrigued,” she says.
All those French chefs ended up needing help translating, and after her immersive year in France she was able to help. The following summer, Chef Kinch returned to New York to receive a James Beard Award, and she ended up helping at that event as well, crossing paths again.
At that time, she recalls, “California felt like a world away. It felt more realistic for me to move back to France than to move to California.” But when a friend told her that Michelin-three-starred restaurant Manresa was hiring a food runner, she hopped on an airplane. At the interview, when they told her she had the job but had to start the following week, she said yes, sealing the deal on her future. She never went back to New York and her mom had to send her all her stuff, as she launched a brand new life here in Los Gatos.
“It was a wild ride!” says Ruzicka, looking back. “It was a huge learning curve, but amazing. And now it feels like a blur; it was so jam-packed and nonstop.”
That initial impulse to follow her gut and get her foot in the door at one of the world’s greatest restaurants led to the Manresa Bread Project as a standalone business, dropping the “project” as the very first Manresa Bread brick-and-mortar location opened in 2015. Ten years later, Manresa Bread now consists of an 18,000-square-foot commissary space in Campbell to support their stores in Los Altos, Campbell, Palo Alto and Santa Cruz.
The focus remains the same as in those beginning farmers market days: naturally fermented sourdough and laminated pastries highlighting seasonal produce. And what truly sets MB apart, making Ruzicka a tastemaker here in our locals, is the New American Stone Mill that they purchased in 2018 for grinding California-grown grains into flour, utilized in the majority of their breads (at least 50% to 100% whole-grain milled).
Late this past summer they announced that Manresa Bread will be taking over the cavernous former Izakaya West End (formerly West End Tap) space in Santa Cruz, moving from their pocket-sized 300-square-foot store nearby. This is a double yay moment in history for Ruzicka because it also makes it the first location where all the bread and pastries will be made onsite. It’s also really exciting for her because she can walk to work, living just two blocks away.
Better yet, she will have more time to be in the kitchen there. “It will be nice to get back down to baking daily, more than just the business side that I’ve been in the last few years,” she says.
And as they look to the future, the overall vision is to continue to improve the quality of their products, to continue to grow and to develop more ways to bake more in-store at every location. Ruzicka repeats that for her, getting the customers to have the ultimate best experience of every product is the main achievement.
For her, “the goal and dream is for people to be eating warm croissants fresh out of the oven.”
Manresa Bread
Campbell, Los Altos, Los Gatos, Palo Alto, Santa Cruz
