Bub and Grandma’s Restaurant and Bakery is a phenomenally popular breakfast and lunch establishment in the Glassell Park neighborhood of northeast Los Angeles. It’s the retail home for the acclaimed 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 welcoming.
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 continues with us.
Hi, I'm Carla Hall of ABC's The Chew. You're listening to The SoCal Restaurant Show on AM830KLAA. Who do you who? And we're 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 AM830KLAA, the home of Angels Baseball 2024. It can also catch us on the AM830 Angels app. I'm Andy Harris, the executive producer and co-host of the show. Thanks for spending part of your Saturday morning with us. We do appreciate it. And we're enthusiastically presented to you each and every week by Melissa's World Variety Produce and West Coast Prime Meats. If you're at all into artisan bread, the Chebata in particular for bub and grandmas, this is a loaf of bread that you're familiar with. We are speaking with founder and master baker Andy Caden. Andy, thanks for hanging in there and welcome back. Now, you're in this 300 square feet production facility. What's the next step? And of course, not in the back of your mind, but in the front of your mind, you still want to open this sandwich shop. That's correct. Yeah, so just trying to hack it together and keep this thing growing as best I can. But the intention at that point was not to open a wholesale bakery at all, but just to kind of supplement our production for the sandwich shop. So I'm out there while I'm not baking. I'm out there looking for a space where we can potentially move our whole thing to. But that is a very difficult proposition in Los Angeles, especially when at that point and still a little bit now, I know nothing. So I'm just trying to figure out everything, learn as much as I can. And meanwhile, were the folks that do in our first account took it upon themselves to put our name on their menu. And it kind of acted as a little bit of marketing for us, which we don't do. So I started picking up other accounts and we're growing and moved across the hallway to a 600 square foot space, which was a breath of fresh air for about 15 minutes. And then we found our wholesale bakery maybe a year later in Frogtown. And moved our operation there. So we fully committed to wholesale and that was in 2018. In 2019, we found a space in Bluffsdale Park for the restaurant. But now we had so many accounts for wholesale that we needed to kind of grow the businesses separately. So the wholesale business existed on its own doing what it does for the restaurants and markets and hotels around town. And then we signed our lease on the restaurant in November of 2019, about three months before a certain global pandemic, you know, put the brakes on all construction and other far more important things. So it was a complicated process of getting this place open. And Andy, what you might mention is we're transitioning to talk about the Bub and Grandma's Restaurant and Cafe, actually Restaurant and Bakery. You have a full production bakery that is at the restaurant that is visible to your guests. I mean, there's no hiding and, you know, that steam rotating deck oven that you have kind of right in the center of things, you know, that says this is a serious bakery. Yeah, so in the process of setting up the restaurant and, you know, when I was thinking about a sandwich shop, I was thinking about, you know, taking over a Jimmy Jones or something like that and having, you know, two employees. The bakery was large and also I, at that point, was a few years into working with Christopher Lear, who was our head baker there for, you know, basically from 2016 until 2019, when we, you know, started working on the restaurant, I wanted to build Chris a patient kitchen so that he could do whatever he wanted at the restaurant and upgrade our offerings beyond sandwiches. The wide pastry menu also has fun, fun, delicious things and that was why we went for something a little bit larger because our capabilities had expanded since we were first thinking about, you know, just opening a very simple sandwich shop. Andy for the Bob and Grandma's restaurant, you're open in various day parts and then also two evenings before we, yeah, before we get into it any further and talk about some of the wonderful menu items that you have, kind of give us the overview of day parts in hours so people understand because it's complicated. Yeah, we, you know, we started with our initial format of being open from 8 to 3 during, you know, 8 in the morning to 3pm for breakfast and lunch and over the, over time we had always talked about doing live jazz here, we built a space with that in mind, it's just taken a very long time to wrangle the daytime operations as you can ask any person running a restaurant right now how difficult it is to produce profits. Once we were moving in a good direction, we were finally able in April this year to start doing BG nights, which is every Sunday and Monday night from 5pm to 10pm. We have two full sets of the jazz piano player, we had our first band last weekend, so we're going to graduate to more and more jazz groups and we have a full dinner menu, which is really delicious beer and wine and it's a great place to kind of spend your off night evening. So we kind of designed it to be catered to restaurant, you know, food workers folks who are off on Sunday Monday, which is a typical schedule to come hang out with us and drink wine and have roast chickens and cheese burgers and meatloaf platters and all sorts of good sort of post-binary items for evening time while listening to really amazing jazz piano. Andy, do you ever sleep? Not much these days. I'm about to get married in about 10 days and-- Congratulations. In 2018, so hopefully I can get some sleep on that trip, but you know, who knows, depends on when the emails come in. Yeah, well, we definitely know about that. Now, in terms of specifically talking about some of the menu items that folks can experience at Bub and Grandmas, you have become known and one might think oddly because you have a lot of other deliciousness that is on your lunch menu with the hot and cold sandwiches, but you're particularly known for your tuna sandwich served on how hot. Tell us about where that came from. Well, it certainly was something that felt like a necessity based on the style of restaurant that we're going for, which is drafting behind the sort of diners and sort of Jewish delis of New York and New Jersey and Connecticut where I kind of spent the bulk of my youth. It also was where our chef Zach Jarrett spent his youth in suburban New Jersey, which is where I'm from, and we bonded over the-- it was a very easy conversation with Zach to try and figure out what we wanted this place to be because it's coming straight from our experience. We didn't want it to be a straight rip diner where we're just sort of doing a character of what the diners are supposed to be or delis are supposed to be. It's more wide than that. It comes from-- it speaks that language, but it's not exclusively speaking that language. And I think the tuna sandwich is the perfect example of that where a classic, if you're thinking in New York context, Eisenberg's now called S&P, deli where they had a classic workman's lunch tuna sandwich, that's the kind of place that where, you know, uses our model. In terms of the thing that makes it really distinctive, it has a huge chunk of iceberg lettuce across the middle of it that provides the perfect crunch and also holds the sandwich together. That is an idea that we sort of, you know, lifted from Palace Diner in Maine, which is a phenomenal, phenomenal, like 12-seat train car diner that's doing incredible things. They've won a James Beard Award up there. And Zach and I had both been there and were like, "Wow, why would any sandwich not have a giant chunk of iceberg lettuce on it going forward?" So we employ that in good amount here. Andy, there are no secrets in the restaurant business. In inspiration is where you find it and it's definitely nothing to apologize for. You also have some intriguing sides that, you know, you have created in-house. I was pleasantly surprised by the olive and almond salad, something very simple. But those combination of ingredients for a side do a sandwich and I was enjoying the muffleda for that particular experience. It really works well together. So tell us a little bit about the olive and almond salad. Yeah, we have a variety of sides that are all coming from Zach Darr, it's mine. I think, you know, lay no claim to those delicious sides that we have that also come in a side sample where you can get all four of them. All of them, almonds, it just seemed like a kind of, not necessarily coming from that diner language, but we can inject little Italian and French and other kind of components to what we do as long as it's under the umbrella of this diner presentation. So that's a very simple salad of Marcona almonds and a variety of olives with a very light on a bunch of dressing that make it really phenomenal. And also, you know, we have a beer and lighter onion menu items, this helps to complement that by not going over the top of all food that will end your afternoon. There should be some lightness to it so that you can, you know, go on with your day and not feel like you need a nap after you come eat with this. Andy, you always need to have decadent desserts and you seem to have a donut of the day program. Tell me a little bit about that. Is there generally more than one donut selection available per day or how does that work? Yes. You typically have four plus different kinds of donuts and it wholly depends on the mind of Chris Lear and his team, our pastry chef, and what is fresh and amazing at the farmer's market. So all of the fruits that we're getting from the market sort of dictates what our desserts are going to be. So in terms of donuts right now, we're doing a, let's see, we have our chocolate Boston cream donut, which is incredible. We're doing a regular chocolate donut with sprinkles, we have cinnamon sugar, we have I think a plum glazed donut right now that's these incredible plums from Andy's orchard, which is one of the best farms in California. And then we're also doing our, the left as well with fresh peaches from Andy's orchard. And you know, there's a million different things that are that are dictated by the fruit. But in terms of donuts, they are in a constant cycle of change, which keeps things really exciting for folks and in all honesty, myself as well, my stomach. Hey, you know, if you don't please the boss, what are you doing now, Andy, before we need to say goodbye, we need to let our listeners know where in Glassell Park you are and you have a very valuable parking tip because if you don't know the secret of this, parking, you know, like right in front of you or around the corner on one of the side streets, not so easy, but if you share that little tip, there's parking there. What do you know? There is, there is a whole street of typically available parking that is one block behind behind us. So we have Eagle Rock Boulevard, which is where our restaurant is located. One block behind us is a bushwick, which is a street of all just full of parking. And then you can just walk one block through the alley and you're at the restaurant. So that's the key. It can seem daunting at first when you pull up and there's no parking right in front of the restaurant, but one block away, it's an easy, easy walk and an easy find. Absolutely. And the street address there, it's 3507 Eagle Rock Boulevard, right in Glassell Park. Ladies and gentlemen, Baker and restaurateur Andy Caden, congratulations on the pending capsules. You can find his bread at better restaurants all across LA. Also I believe at the Hollywood Farmers Market and the Culver City Farmers Market, if I have that correct, Andy, and also, also of course, everything is available at the Bub and Grandma's restaurant in Bakery and Glassell Park, and it doesn't get any fresher than that. Andy again, congratulations, great sharing a little time with you. And we definitely look forward to following your progress, and again, congratulations on the pending capsules. You are listening to the SoCal restaurant shell. When we're returned, yes, as promised, Chef Andrew Grohl. We're proudly presented by Melissa's World Variety Produce and West Coast Prime Meats back on a flash. [MUSIC PLAYING]
