By Eliza Ridgeway
 Esther Nio has high standards for her hand-thrown artisan pretzels. She insists that they absolutely must be eaten the day they are made – and preferably not with mustard. |
Open just three weeks, the new bakery on the northeast edge of Los Altos has a crowd-pleaser with its artisan pretzels, and might win even the leery over to an appreciation for sauerkraut’s delicious potential. Esther’s German Bakery and Cafe replaced the Second Cup Cafe just down the block from Armadillo Willy’s and Chef Chu’s on San Antonio Road.
For the last few years, Los Altos residents have known Esther’s as a wholesale bakery that sold at local farmers markets and stores such as Draeger’s and the Milk Pail Market. Esther Nio and her husband, Robert, moved from Germany to California in 1997 for his job in high-tech. Four years ago, they decided to strike out in another direction and create something entirely new to this area.
“Since we missed bread in the beginning, we said – why not do our own?” she said. “Especially I missed the pretzels, because I’m from Bavaria.”
The cafe is Nio’s first storefront incarnation, but she is about to open a bakery in the San Antonio Shopping Center next to Trader Joe’s, in the former Taco Del Mar location.
“I’m overwhelmed – every lunch we’re full,” Nio said of the bakery’s hearty start. Don’t visit after 1 or 2 p.m. and expect to find a huge variety of pastries, as residents will have picked the place clean.
The volume of diners isn’t necessarily the most taxing part of the business. At least in its initial stage, the cafe offers a chance for local expatriates and children of immigrants to reminisce about Old World cuisine and remembered recipes. On a recent afternoon, enthusiastic bunches of accented visitors popped in and out, seeking a special bread or just cruising the new location.
But the bulk of the clientele doesn’t have any special background in German cuisine – they come for the baked goods and the special children’s spot in the back corner of the store, decorated with bright colors, carpeting and cushions on the floor.
“One thing which is really missing (in Los Altos) is a restaurant with a kids area,” Robert said.
The Nios had their children test-drive the space and pick out toys. Nio has seen mothers’ groups drop by to have coffee and pastry, children tucked away in the designated enclave.
The Nios are renovating the covered back patio as a beergarden, and Nio is excited to start serving German-style, low-alcohol hot-weather drinks, including Radler – beer and Sprite mixed – and white wine with sparkling water.
Some of the standout pastries use poppy seeds to great effect, in a moist, intense, seeded coffee cake, and in a poppy seed and cherry strudel in which the syrupy sweetness of the cherries doesn’t overpower the potent richness of the seeds, but keeps the entire pastry oozingly moist.
Those looking for a flour-free fix can pick out a caramel-glazed, granola-based pastry with sesame, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, almonds, oats, raisins and chocolate chips. The apple strudel is deceptively simple – expecting a load of butter and sugar, I balked at my first bite, but my appreciation for the clear apple flavor and simplicity of the strudel grew as I continued to eat. For a more straightforward sugar rush, the two-layer apple cake is a sweet, dense cake somewhere between a shortbread and a sponge cake, with a clean vanilla flavor and big, firm pieces of apple.
The cafe menu includes breakfast and lunch items centered on sausage and egg dishes and baked goods – and baked goods fill the shelves until they sell out toward the end of the day. Nio serves breakfast until 11:30 a.m. or all day, depending on how hectic business gets, and some of the dishes appear on both the breakfast and lunch menus. She dishes up two kinds of sausages, the long, pan-fried bratwurst served in a roll ($4.95) or with sauerkraut and potato salad ($8.95), and the breakfast weisswurst, a lighter veal-and-pork boiled sausage with a mild flavor. She pairs the weisswurst with a pretzel and sweet mustard ($6.95).
But if you want to be authentic, don’t let the pretzel touch the mustard – according to Nio, wieners pair with mustards, pretzels with butter – unsalted, unmelted butter. The pretzels, speckled with chunks of salt, are firm and smooth on the outside, with a crisp outer skin, and creamy-soft on the inside. The handmade pretzels ($1.65) come dappled with kosher salt and pumpkin, sunflower or poppy seeds.
Pretzel-making requires a measure of advanced baking lore – the browned, flavorful, crisp pretzel exterior is created through a process similar in some ways to caramelization, and requires a chemical reaction between the dough’s sugars and amino acids. Although pretzel-craft calls for an understanding of food science, the twisted-dough delicacies have been around since at least the 12th century. A medieval convent manuscript pictured the snack in the hands of the Biblical Queen Esther and King Ahasuerus.
Nio explained that master bakers in Germany typically have seven years of formal education under their belt. The Nios have convinced three bakers to come to the United States and bake for them over the years.
Nio cites her Jewish heritage as the impetus for the soft, white challah that peaks out from amid the dark, hearty, seed-filled German breads. They cut thick slices of the lemon-and-vanilla-flavored egg bread to make French toast.
Other dishes include the Pfannkuchen, slightly thicker than a crepe, served with caramelized apples and powdered sugar, and savory puff pastry entrees stuffed with ground beef, spinach and cheese. She stuffs another strudel with asparagus and cream cheese and lays salmon across its top ($10.95).
They buy the pickled cabbage that forms a sauerkraut base and cook it for hours with apples, white wine, bacon and sugar. It is warm, soft, slippery and pungently sweet and smoky.
Esther’s German Bakery and Cafe is located at 987 N. San Antonio Road, Los Altos. Hours are 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays, 8 a.m. Saturdays and 8:30 a.m. Sundays. For more information, call 941-4463.
Contact Eliza Ridgeway at elizar@latc.com.
