Every Thursday morning my husband and I go to Maison du Pain on Pico Blvd. to spend quality time together and talk about our relationship.
Just kidding. We go for the pastries and the cappuccinos—the best within a 3-mile radius of our house. Our dogs get so excited when see they blue building with the orange awning that a blizzard of fur and drool erupts inside our car. The yelping doesn’t die down until their leashes have been wrapped around one of the tables outside.
Still, we go. We don’t mind when the lines are long or the credit card machine is broken or there are no more tables to sit at or they’re out of scones. The owners, Carmen Salindong and her sister-in-law, Esterlina Santos, are so friendly, it’s hard to feel anything other than cozy as soon as you step through the bakery door. They know our drink order (two cappuccinos, one with sugar, one without); they bring water for our dogs. Sometimes they give my stepdaughters free samples to help them make the very difficult decision of selecting a single pastry.
La Maison du Pain is not just a part of the neighborhood. It’s a part of our identity. Like many Angelenos, my husband and I are transplants from the East coast. We’ve struggled to find a sense of community in a city that often feels sprawling and superficial. We spend most of our time in work-related spaces (even parties begin to feel like “work” when everyone brings a business card). When we’re at home, we wonder what we’re still doing here. We often think of moving.
Instead, we look for those exceptional spaces that make us feel like we belong. These are the local restaurants, shops and cafes where the owners know our names and have more to ask us than just, “What’re you having?” La Maison du Pain is one of those places. It’s where we meet other members of our community, get to know our neighbors, and buy freshly baked bread. It’s part of our weekly ritual, a place where we pause to reflect on our past and fantasize about the future.
It’s also full of shit.
Last week, the LA Times outed the bakery owners as embezzlers. Those two sweet ladies—the ones who know us by name—stole more than five million dollars from their former employer, Robert Smylie, whose law firm fell into financial ruin after as the bakers siphoned funds for personal expenses. A trip to Paris with seventeen relatives. A $150,000 party for one of their daughters. Those two sweet ladies—the ones who stopped whatever they were doing to hold the door for you as waved goodbye, baguette and coffee in hand—were frauds.
I sent my husband a link to the story with the subject line, “Woah. Maison no more?” His response was, “I think we should move.” This may sound extreme, but I understood what he meant. Our sense of community, and of “home,” had been disrupted. We felt betrayed, dirty, and potentially complicit. After all, we’d gone to La Maison du Pain nearly every week for the last five years. We must have contributed hundreds of dollars to their business. And what about our conversations with Carmen and Esterlina? I’ve spent more time with those women than with the people I call my “friends.” How could they look us in the eye like that? How could they give out those “free” samples with such friendly expressions?
Not knowing what else to do with our tangled emotions, we staged an impromptu theater performance in our kitchen, entitled: La Maison du Fraud: A Tale of Two Not-so-Sweet Ladies. My stepdaughter and I played the part of the unsuspecting customers; my husband played Carmen, the baker-deceiver with a crooked chef’s hat and a laugh that would make Voldemort flinch. It was absurd and hilarious, but mostly, I thought, it was therapeutic. Somehow, we had to work through our feelings about La Maison before we could move on with our Saturday.
What happens when the people who make you feel most at home in a big city like Los Angeles turn out to be professional scammers? What happens when the people you see more often than your “real” friends turn out to be fakes?
It’s unclear when La Maison du Pain will close. For now, there are still a few customers sitting under that orange awning. They sip their coffee, blissfully unaware that their chocolate croissants were made with soiled hands, and that the sweet expressions with which the bakers served them quiche are mere masks.
The inevitable closure of La Maison du Pain is not only a loss for the neighborhood; it’s a blow to the delicate webs we Angelenos spin to create community. No, it won’t be hard to find another bakery where we can get cappuccinos every Thursday morning—but we never wanted just another bakery. We wanted a home away from home.
This piece references an article published by the LA Times on April 27, 2015: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bakery-embezzlement-20150428-story.html#page=1