Rusty Mazik, The Bagel Factory
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Rusty Mazik’s bakery business was flooded, vandalized and looted in the wake of hurricane Katrina, and his customer base disappeared overnight. Not willing to pin his hopes on government relief or litigating against insurance underwriters, he’s relying instead on his own wits and adopting a can-do survivor’s spirit to keep himself afloat — and in so doing, helping to restore a mercantile heartbeat to the city of New Orleans.
Why not King Cakes?
It has been said that a catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina's magnitude brings out the best and the worst in people. If anyone should know, it's Rusty Mazik.
Pre-Katrina, Mazik, 46, presided over a thriving business, supplying gourmet baked goods, primarily bread and bagels, to posh hotels and other businesses catering to the city's booming convention and meetings trade. Word of an approaching storm came just as his Bagel Factory was gearing up for a deluge of orders coinciding with the arrival of the AARP convention, which was expected to draw over 100,000 attendees.
Before evacuating, Mazik and his crew burned the midnight oil, scrambling to turn as much raw material as possible into product and putting it in cold storage. A few days earlier, Mazik had opened a walk-in retail shop at the front of his bakery. It was the last step in a costly, phased expansion that saw the Bagel Factory relocate from suburban Metairie to a much larger, modernized facility in the Mid City area of New Orleans.
It would be a month before Mazik was able to get back into New Orleans to see first-hand what Katrina had wrought. He knew there’d been no electricity and that a mass of fouled food awaited. But the chaotic scene that greeted him was almost beyond comprehension.
Doors ripped off the hinges. Trash everywhere. Machinery toppled. Cash register smashed into pieces on the floor. Soda machine busted open and robbed of coins.
Losing one’s customer base to nature’s fury, not to mention hundreds of lives and large swaths of the city, is bad enough. But for Mazik, having to confront wanton destruction wrought by human hands was something else again.
“You’re just so depressed when you walk in and see this, and you think to yourself: ‘These were people living in this neighborhood. They just came in and destroyed the place.’
“You know, come in, take the food, whatever. But there’s no reason to push over my machinery into the water. That’s just uncalled for.”
Alas, Mazik, married with two children, had more than just his livelihood to worry about. His home in Mandeville, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, also took a hit. The storm had ripped off a section of the roof, and water poured in through the attic, laying waste to his kitchen.
Mazik was taking all this more or less in stride, and waiting to learn his fate at the hands of insurance adjusters, when a neighbor inquired about his situation. “He asked me if I could use some help, and I said, ‘Well, most certainly.”
It so happened that the neighbor, Ed Dicks, was a parishioner at a church in nearby Covington that was recruiting volunteers to assist victims of the hurricane. “From all over the country,” says Mazik, “these people started showing up.”
Over the course of a month, Trinity Church assigned three crews to Mazik. The first, consisting of college boys, tackled the nasty business of extracting trash and spoiled foodstuffs from the bakery. The next crew -- using a pressure washer, bleach and lots of elbow grease -- got the place spic and span. Then came a group of “old farm boys from Missouri,” says Mazik; they helped with electrical work and fixing equipment. (Mazik used what money he did have to buy new electric moters for mixers and other machines.)
If the church volunteers were selfless Samaritans, representatives from the insurance companies were less than saintly. According to Mazik, the adjuster who came to inspect the bakery took one look at the water line inside the facility and said, “ ‘Nothing’s covered.’ He walked back out, and that was the end of that.”
No matter that some of the actual damages sustained were due to vandalism, not flooding. “They were figuring the government was going to pay, so they weren’t going to. There’s no other way to explain it,” says Mazik.
Mazik did manage to obtain a settlement from the underwriter of his homeowner’s insurance policy, but not without a lot of wrangling. It wasn’t enough money to cover the cost of hiring contractors to handle all of work, so Mazik is rolling up his sleeves, pounding sheetrock and flooring.
“I had no choice,” he says. “I’m trying to save every penny.”
Not surprisingly, class-action lawyers are taking to the airwaves with advertisements soliciting claims against insurance companies. While not ruling out joining the litigation bandwagon, Mazik says “I don’t have time to worry about all that. Let’s get the ball rolling and get off the ground here and take care of ourselves.”
In other words, forget about pinning one’s hopes on lawyers or waiting for the government to come through with relief for small businesses. Frustrated with bureaucratic relief rhetoric and sketchy promises, entrepreneurs like Mazik are relying on their own wits and adopting a can-do survivor’s spirit to keep themselves afloat — and in so doing, helping to restore a mercantile heartbeat to the city of New Orleans.
“I feel like we should be able to work our way out. There’s opportunity there,” says Mazik.
The Bagel Factory was operational again, but where to find customers? With New Orleanians scattered far and wide and a rebound in the convention business still months away, he had to improvise.
King cake and pastries had never been a mainstay of the Bagel Factory; sometimes operating around the clock in order to deliver big orders on short notice, Mazik was preoccupied with catering to a core customer base.
“The convention center would call me: ‘I need 600 dozen bagels, and I want ’em here at midnight.’ ”
But again, adversity sows the seeds of opportunity. “Our bakery was a high-end bakery,’’ says Mazik. There were no preservatives -- that was our signature -- and everything was first class.”
So why not king cake? Mazik had learned from a supplier that there were 12 fewer bakeries operating in the New Orleans area than there were before the storm. “That’s why I thought, ‘Man, this is a perfect opportunity -- let’s do it!”
In between refining a recipe for king cake icing and making repairs to his storm-battered house, Mazik has had to contend with obtaining basic services for his bakery. “I didn’t even get gas until the middle of last month,” he says, “and I had to drag the guy out of his truck -- just about -- to get him to do it. Still don’t have phone service. Can you believe that? Five months later.”
Mazik’s King Cake Shop (www.kingcakeshop.com) offers both traditional and filled varieties. The cakes are made from hand-braided dough, rolled in cinnamon and topped with Mazik’s delicious butter-crème icing. Every package includes a limited-edition print, suitable for framing, entitled "Mardi Gras Everlasting" -- a tribute to Mardi Gras royalty by award-winning New Orleans artist Ray Cole; a set of four Mardi Gras greeting cards; Mardi Gras beads and doubloons; a special New Orleans-style blend of coffee and chicory; and a wonderful history of king cake and New Orleans Mardi Gras.
We were proud to be able to work wtih Rusty on the New Orleans Bake Sale this February, sending down ingredients, manpower and PR support to the New Orleans bake sale.