Bub and Grandma’s Restaurant and Bakery is a standout breakfast and lunch establishment located in the Glassell Park neighborhood of northeast Los Angeles. It’s the retail home for the wildly popular Bub and Grandma’s Bread and serve daily pastries, sandwiches, salads, sides, chips and other “really good stuff.” They also offer an eclectic collection of craft beer and premium wines.
“On Sunday and Monday Nights at Bub and Grandma’s after dark are BG Nights with musical guests and cheese, meat and veggie charcuterie boards, Bub’s Bread with toppings, and desserts like their Baguette Bread Pudding with house-made Vanillas Ice Cream and Hot Fudge.”
Breakfast is served daily from 8:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m. For Lunch Cold Sandwiches are on the menu starting at 10:00 a.m., with full Lunch available at 11:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m.
They are well-known for their Classic Tuna Salad with iceberg lettuce, pickles, mayo, mustard and red onion served on House Challah. There is definitely an East Coast deli vibe to the establishment but the staff is friendly.
Bub and Grandma’s artisan breads are also available at the Hollywood Farmers Market on Sundays and the Culver City Farmers Market on Tuesdays.
Founder and Baker Andy Kadin joins us on the rise.
This is your captain speaking. I'm Honor Jotten, captain of Holland America Line, MS Master. You're listening to the so-called restaurant show on AM-830-KLAA. And welcome back. It is the SoCal restaurant show, and we're here with you every Saturday morning from 10 AM until 12 noon, right here on AM-830-KLAA, the home of Angels Baseball 2024, and you can also catch us on the AM-830 Angels app. I'm Andy Harris, the executive producer and co-host of the show, and we're enthusiastically presented by Melissa's World Variety Produce and West Coast Prime Meats. Well, more than a few years ago, the La Brea Bakery really introduced artisan bread into Los Angeles, and it has been a bonfire since then. It is a very highly competitive field now, and we have everything from bakers that are doing a few loaves out of their home kitchens to very, very large commercial operations like La Brea Bakery, which really isn't artisan anymore. But an artisan bakery that still maintains their integrity is the unusually named Bub and Grandma's, and if you're into the bread scene at all, Bub and Grandma's is a name you definitely know the better restaurants all over town have their bread, but it's kind of a special sideline. They also have a restaurant and a cafe in Glasol Park. The proprietor, Andy Caden, seems to keep a very low profile. I think he wants the bread to speak for itself, but I recently had a chance to meet him and definitely wanted to get him on the show because this is really an incredible success story. So with that is background for the first time, it is a pleasure to welcome Master Baker, Andy Caden, behind Bub and Grandma's restaurant and Bakery and the bread to the show. Andy, good morning and welcome. Hi, Andy. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for finding some time for us. I know you are one busy fella. That is for sure, but thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Andy, what's really nice is successful is you've been and you have a too-faceted operation with the wholesale on one side, the restaurant on another. I think as we would all agree in terms of artisan bread in the greater LA area right now, competition is really almost cutthroat and it is also in terms of delivering to restaurants, particularly as you've gotten bigger. Just that whole infrastructure of being able to deliver on time to these restaurants when they need the bread. I mean, that's a Rubik's Cube in itself. It sure is. I'm sitting here in front of my computer right now and receiving an e-call to someone checking in about where their bread is. Maybe we need to dig in a little deeper, but it's a very complex system. We're delivering to about 170 restaurants and markets around LA right now. That Rubik's Cube is constantly, the colors are changing around all the time, so it's an ever-evolving little Tetris problem. And Andy, to be honest about it, you know, restaurateurs and chefs, they're wonderful people, but when it comes to their suppliers and particularly getting their artisan bread on time, I'm sure there's some occasions you don't want to be on the other end of those conversations, particularly if it's late. I would say that our accounts have been almost entirely wonderful. And we pride ourselves on our constant communication and making sure that when our customers aren't getting what they need, that we're feeling the anxiety that they're feeling as well, so that we can try and resolve those problems for them as quickly as possible. Andy, that's why you have the sterling reputation that you have, but it's still difficult and just maneuvering around Los Angeles these days is a challenge unto itself. But let's back up a little bit. If I have this right and I have to apologize, I haven't read your book. It's something I should get because I'm definitely interested in your story, but you started out doing bread in your home kitchen. Do I have that right? That's correct. Yeah, I'm sitting at the office at the restaurant right now, which is about four minutes from that same house that I still live in. And yeah, I was a writer in advertising and eventually television as well and I wasn't enjoying myself and always have been an obsessive eater and cooker of things and really wanted to use this time around when I was 30, which is about 12 years ago, to focus on how I can get out of the thing that I despise doing, which could have been for the rest of my life, towards something that could potentially provide some more happiness in my life and something that feels a little bit more earnest and not duplicitous. Like advertising can be, doesn't have to be the candy. Wow. Yeah. That's, you know, that's quite a shift. Now, when you were baking out of your home kitchen, what were some of your original creations? Um, 2014 was to figure out how bread works so I could talk to a baker about what I wanted for the sandwich that I wanted to open because that was the focus at the time. Um, when, when you have a job that you don't love very much lunch becomes a very important hour of the day. So when you're escaping, you focus on where you can find the absolute best sandwiches in Los Angeles and at that time, there were very few great sandwich options in my area. And then I thought that that was something that needed correction. So the very first bread that I were working on were bread that I was anticipating using at my sandwich up. So Chibata, some sourdoughs and baguettes, which are ridiculously difficult near impossible to make great at home. Um, but yeah, that was the start. And then I would use those sort of use that basic knowledge that I obtained from doing it on a daily basis, which is what I had committed to at that point for some psychotic reason. Um, to, you know, talk to those bakers about what I wanted for the shop and then they would deliver it to me so I wouldn't have to be baking it. But in the process of making hundreds of loads over the course of six months, I was giving them away to everyone that I could find as my freezer was full. And one of my friends, friends, Jed Mehe, was working at Dune, the restaurant that's in Atwater Village still, and it's still delicious. And the owner, Scott Zweisen, called me out of the blue and asked if I could make that Chibata I was working on for him. Uh-huh. I didn't think much of it at the time and just said, yes, not realizing that that means that seven days a week for what seems to be the rest of my life now. And where did it go from there? When did you start selling in the farmer's markets? Yeah, so there was a long and difficult period from when I started with one wholesale account and I was still working at the time. So I would be doing the bread in the very early dark morning, go deliver it and then drive to a studio or an ad agency or something like that and then come back and mix at night again. So it was a full 24-hour situation, no kidding, wow, but at that point, there was always a constant effort to figure out how to level up because within my tiny, you know, home depot oven in my rental house at that time, you know, it was causing lots of problems, lots of exploded light bulbs inside the oven and, you know, bread dropped on the floor and I fell down my front steps with a 50-pound, you know, container of dough and had to leave it there and it baked on the step throughout the day. But lots of different tactics I baked in a pizza oven, I was baking behind a couple other upstart bakeries here and then eventually when Clark Street bread, who's another great baker in town, Zach Hall, moved his operations out of Grand Central Market, I started using his equipment behind him in the stall at Grand Central Market, eventually purchased his oven and mixer from him and moved to my own 290 square foot commercial kitchen closet. Oh yeah, 290 square feet, yeah, that's huge. Yeah, it's very expensive, I could touch both walls, but yeah, that was the step up there where things got very real when I actually had my own space and own equipment and we started, you know, growing from there. The markets were a little bit later, we started at Smorgasburg, which was a great opportunity for us right when they launched in downtown LA and were there for about six months before we were able to get into the Hollywood farmers market, which has been really fantastic, both have worked fantastic for us. So Smorgasburg really then was your ticket to the farmers markets because I imagine you must have gotten some huge play. Smorgasburg has turned out to be a great incubator for food products and gourmet specialty items and still going great guns, but it's amazing if you kind of go back in their history and see some of the people that have started there and then now going on to their own brick and mortar and bigger things from there, but you know, great connection and great LA attraction. 100% you know, Zach Brooks is doing a wonderful thing with what they've got going on down there and allowing a lot of these businesses that started a lot like mine where you, you, you step into this role of being a baker or a cook or having a small food business and the pathway from your home kitchen and just selling to your friends or doing whatever you're doing to kind of keep that process sustained. Growing from there to an actual brick and mortar or an actual professional permitted space that you can do what you do is extremely difficult process, especially in Los Angeles. It's not made, you know, very, very simple for these folks who are just trying to get something going. So to have a step where you can kind of step into a professional setting like Smorgasburg and have access to all of those customers every weekend was incredibly invaluable and you look around the city. Like you said, I, you know, our standards right next to Maurice Bagels and he's got his, his store in Silver Lake. There's a, there's a long list of folks that were there at the same time as us that are now, you know, have multiple units are doing great. So that was an incredible first step for us. Oh, good. Ladies and gentlemen, it is Bub and Grandma's. We're speaking with Master Baker and founder Andy Caden. Now, while he was doing this, of course, what he really wanted to do was open his sandwich cafe and when we come back from the break, we'll get kind of the delineation, how all of that happened. You are listening to the SoCal restaurant show. We're proudly presented by Melissa's World Variety produce and West Coast prime meets. We'll be back before you know it. it.
