The Baker Inspired by a Family Pastry Shop That Closed Before He Was Born

Baker Dave Dreifus never had the chance to visit Stern’s Pastry Shop, the bakery his grandparents owned and operated in Brooklyn. Stern’s closed a few years before Dave was born, but he feels as if he’s been there. “[I’ve] dreamt endlessly about Stern’s,” he says. “I’ve seen it in my mind.” 

While it was a classic New York bakery, it was also influenced by his grandparents’ German and Franco-German roots. Both of their families fled Europe in the late 1930s for the U.S. When his grandmother Hannah was little, her father was sent to Buchenwald, just as the concentration camp was opening, Dave believes. Relying on a distant relative in New York City, her mother obtained paperwork allowing the family to immigrate to America. With the documents in hand, she went to Buchenwald and said: “We have paperwork to leave. We’ll never come back again, we don’t want anything to do with this country,” Dave shares. Remarkably, they let him go. 

Around the same time, his grandfather Armin and his parents fled Pirmasens, a German town near the French border, settling first in a German-Jewish enclave in Washington Heights and later in Brooklyn. Armin got his first job there, sweeping floors and washing dishes at a nearby bakery called Stern’s in Midwood.

During the war, he left the bakery, enlisting in the armed forces, serving as one of the Ritchie Boys, a once-secret U.S. intelligence unit made up of German and Austrian Jews who had escaped the war. Trained as interrogators at Camp Ritchie in Maryland and using their German-language skills, they interrogated Nazis and gathered curcial intelligence during the war. Armin fought in the Battle of the Bulge and, as the family recently learned through an online community, his battalion liberated Buchenwald — a story he never told Hannah.   

When he returned to New York after the war, they married, and Armin returned to Stern’s. becoming a baker, working his way up through the ranks to head baker, then a co-owner, and finally the owner of both the bakery and the building that housed it. Hannah’s maiden name was Stern — though she wasn’t related to the original owner — so, when Armin had the opportunity to rename the bakery, he chose to keep it as Stern’s.

Together, they ran the bakery for years. While he baked apple strudel, babka, rugelach, and the brownies the bakery was known for, Hannah oversaw the front of the house. The bakery closed in the mid-1980s and Armin tragically passed away a week after retiring. 

Two generations down the family tree, Dave didn’t set out to follow in his grandparents’ footsteps. He attended the Culinary Institute of America and spent most of his career working on the savory side of prestigious kitchens. During the pandemic, he started running a cookie company out of his apartment and, in May of 2021 he opened Best Damn Cookies, a stand in the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. His ever-changing selection, which has included a carrot citrus rye linzer and a cookie with nori, white chocolate, and pecans, is fitting for a classically-trained chef. But, the most meaningful cookies, he says, are his seasonal rugelach, which nod directly to his grandparents’ bakery. 

Having never been able to visit it — but, for in his mind — Dave says: “I feel this burning desire to represent my family.”