Before the sun rises, seven trucks loaded with warm, crusty loaves of Italian and sourdough bread, onion kaiser rolls, bundles of baguettes and more rumble out of an industrial complex in Alsip.
The red, green and yellow trucks head from Labriola Bakery to fine restaurants, hotels, convention centers, riverboat casinos and grocery stores. The fresh bread is eagerly awaited, for instance, at McCormick Place, where Tom Elder is executive chef for Levy Restaurants, food service provider for the convention center.
“The bread has very little or no preservatives. It’s an old-world bread,” said Elder, explaining why he chose Labriola Bakery, a relative upstart in the commercial bakery business, as one of the three bakeries that supply breads and rolls to the convention center.
In just four years, the bakery founded by 35-year-old Rich Labriola boasts a client list that numbers 160 and includes such well-known Chicago eateries as Spago, Gibson’s Steak House and Hugo’s Frog Bar, as well as Bacino’s restaurants in Naperville and Orland Park.
Places where food is not the sole focus but still an important part of satisfying the customer also have jumped on the Labriola bandwagon. In addition to McCormick Place, Labriola clients include the Empress Casino in Hammond and the stadium clubs at Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park.
In 1993, Labriola, who lives in Blue Island with wife Stephanie, decided that he could make a better bread than the one he had been distributing since 1989 for a bakery on Chicago’s North Side.
“I started taking an interest in how to make bread,” said Labriola, adding that his only previous experience remotely connected to baking bread was throwing pizza dough.
“My dad had a little pizza place in Calumet City, so I had worked in dough as a kid,” he said.
Labriola began studying and perfecting his skill at making high-quality breads, a process that continues today. His education has included classes at the San Francisco Baking Institute and the National Baking Center in Minneapolis as well as stints at bakeries throughout the United States that specialize in making Italian and French breads.
While getting into the mix of making bread and learning what equipment he would need to launch a commercial bakery, Labriola found himself developing a passion for artisan bread, the definition of which varies slightly depending on whom you talk to. But one thing is agreed. Artisan breads consist of the most basic of ingredients: flour, water, a leavening agent and salt.
Unlike doughy white bread, these flavorful breads often are baked on a hearth, not in a pan, and they also may be handmade.
“Artisan bread is simple,” Labriola said. “The idea is to be able to taste the bread’s flavor. It’s not a yeasty taste.”
Examples such as Labriola’s ficelles or country Italian bread, made with little or no preservatives, have grown in popularity nationwide over the last few years.
“Everyone can look around, even in middle America, where things tend to happen last, and say, `There’s an artisan bakery,’ ” said Ian Duffy, a baker/instructor for the San Francisco Baking Institute, which offers classes in making the specialty baked goods.
“People are recognizing that they want better breads,” added Gina Piccolino of the Bread Bakers Guild of America. “As people have become more educated about what is being put in breads, they are turning more to artisan breads.”
Piccolino is director of activities and membership services for the Bread Bakers Guild, based outside Pittsburgh. The non-profit organization, which provides education for the makers of artisan breads, has a membership that includes bakery owners and employees, home bakers and bakery suppliers. The guild, which started five years ago with 250 members, now has 1,200, including Labriola.
Like the cappuccinos and other designer coffees that came before them, artisan breads are a culinary trends. For Labriola, however, breadmaking is not just a passing fancy, Piccolino said.
“He’s passionate about his work,” she said. “Artisan bakers, like Rich, have a genuine love of their craft. They spend long hours in front of a hot oven tending a breathing organism.”
Labriola acknowledges that learning to make good bread did not come easily.
“I’ve thrown tons of dough away,” he said. “But that’s how you learn.”
Restaurateurs and others seem to like the dough Labriola and his employees turn out. During the height of the busy time, which is the summer’s convention season, the bakery has a work force of 20 employees.
The bakery is located in a 10,000-square-foot space where yeast, water and other bread fixings bubble as they mix in silver-colored vats that can hold up to 500 pounds of dough.
“The first time I saw one of those, I wanted to get in and ride around in it,” said Stephanie Labriola with a laugh. “It looks like a ride at Disney World — the little teacups.”
In one part of the bakery, dough is cut into identical dinner rolls that travel briskly along a clanging conveyor belt. In another area, workers knead dough by hand or stamp rolls with a decorative mark that distinguishes them as kaisers.
Ingredients and timing are crucial to a good-tasting bread.
“If you don’t have the right stuff in the bread, and don’t mix it right and don’t have the right temperature, then it won’t turn out,” said Heinz Kraus, a Labriola baker, describing how easily good dough can go wrong.
“Every day you have to make adjustments (depending on such factors as the humidity and temperature outdoors),” added the native of Cologne, Germany, who now lives in Alsip.
“At big bakeries, they try to speed up production, which is totally contrary to making good bread,” Labriola noted. “At every step, we try to take a little extra care. If it takes our competitors two or three hours to make a bread, we want ours to take three or four hours.”
Breads such as the ficelle, which is provided to the stadium clubs at Wrigley and Comiskey Parks, take a total of 24 hours to make, from mixing the dough through a long fermentation process to baking.
The bakery produces about 20 different doughs and 100 different products. Sourdough, for example, can be fashioned as a loaf or roll.
In 1994, its first year of business, the bakery posted sales of $350,000. In 1998, the couple estimates that sales will top $1.5 million.
Stephanie Labriola handles the bookkeeping and customer service calls for the business. Describing an average business day, her husband said, “I make new sales calls, may test a new bread, oversee production and, possibly, go home to sleep.”
It’s a good bet that when Labriola puts his head down, he also dreams of bread. A pleasant dream would include keeping old customers satisfied while attracting new ones. He estimates that the bakery could grow to 10 times its current production of about 5,000 loaves a week and still maintain quality.
Attracting new customers is as simple and as difficult as getting them to taste a sample of the bread. That is how Labriola won Spago as a client.
“We didn’t have space to do our own bread. So we tried (samples) of a dozen different bakeries, and we chose Labriola,” said Peter Pollay, the restaurant’s kitchen manager.
“We like the flavor,” he said. “It’s a good consistency and a nice crust. And they make specialty breads for us.”
Labriola’s country Italian bread was concocted when Spago asked for a rustic bread. Spago staffers specified the types of grains they wanted used and “after two or three tries, they made it just the way we wanted it,” Pollay said.
Such attention to detail and emphasis on customer service is also appreciated by Elder, who presides over McCormick Place’s food service. Before a large convention comes to town, “we give Rich a general idea of what we’ll need for the show, so he can get in the basic flours and ingredients. But the exact ordering is done the day before.”
That last-minute ordering ensures that the bread is the way that customers and Labriola like it — fresh. The Labriolas don’t want their bakery to grow so large that they cannot maintain their high quality. They do, however, anticipate, expanding into a 6,000-square-foot space adjacent to their current location.
When that expansion occurs, probably by the end of this year, the Labriolas will tackle their next dream, that of opening a retail store. Labriola said the success of his commercial bakery proves that people want good bread and will go out of their way to get it — even to an industrial complex in Alsip.
“Older people tell us how they used to go to the corner bakery and go to the back door and get bread fresh straight from the oven,” Labriola said.
Apparently, Labriola is not the only person who is passionate about good bread.
“People get teary-eyed (recalling corner bakeries). They want to smell the bread, they want to see it come out of the ovens,” he said. “People get emotional about bread.”
