Porto's opening Northridge bakery
Establishment will be 6th in SoCal for popular Cuban chain when it starts serving on Tuesday
dailynews.com
The wait is nearly over.
In a matter of days, there will be no need to circle the block and parking lot time and time again to check out if Porto's Bakery & Café is up and running at its newest location on Nordhoff Street, in the south end of the Northridge Fashion Center.
The Porto family has set Tuesday for the grand opening — a day long-awaited among local residents and the Porto family.
“We are very happy to be joining Northridge and surrounding communities,” said Raul Porto Jr., chief executive officer and parttime baker. “Many years ago we did a customer survey and were surprised to find out a large portion of our customers were coming from (this area). For years we had been looking for the right location and feel like we found it.”
Come Tuesday, employees will be masked and customers will be encouraged to do so too, but not required. No other formal restrictions are in place for the opening.
On Friday, the business held the second of a four-day team training event to give the site's new 200 employees practice serv
ing invitation-only customers, to iron out any kinks.
The teams are ready to bake, pour some cafecito and break some bread, according to family members.
“We want them to excel, know our guests, focus on details,” said Jennifer Wells, head of marketing and brand strategy.
The Northridge location is the sixth Southern California business venture, which started decades ago by matriarch Rosa Porto, who honed her baking skill in her native Cuba.
Once in Los Angeles, Rosa attempted to find work in local bakeries, but as a woman in the 1970s she struck out.
She didn't give up. Instead, she began baking cakes nonstop out of her family's home every Thursday through Sunday.
Several years later, having outgrown her homebased operation, she opened a shop a few blocks away where her pastries turned generations after generations into loyal guests and Porto's Bakery & Café into a family tradition.
Since then, the business has flourished at sites in Glendale, Burbank, Buena Park, Downey and West Covina. Northridge is the third largest of the locations.
Anna Figueras, 89, remembers hearing about Porto's cakes from a friend early on and decided to seek her out.
She went to her two-bedroom apartment in the Silver Lake area where Porto baked her cakes and cooled them on sheets on top of beds.
Figueras' first taste was the pineapple Cuban cake. She was hooked.
“Her apartment was so clean and the cakes so beautifully done,” Figueras said on Friday in Spanish through her son, Manny Figueras.
Northridge was the third Porto's opening Figueras has attended.
“We are very happy and
Margarita Navarro, left, and Betty Porto are co-owners of the new Porto's Bakery & Cafe in Northridge Fashion Center. The location is the sixth in Southern California.
thrilled to know the Porto family still has that pride in their mother's work,” the octogenarian said. “They use all good ingredients.”
And now a third generation is getting into the act at the latest location.
Adrian Porto, Rosa's grandson, is the back-of-thehouse
manager.
The 30-year-old earned his business degree at CSUN, went to a top-notch culinary school in Rhode Island, came back to Los Angeles and worked in other restaurants before coming on board at Porto's. He was part of getting the Northridge
location up off the ground.
“I was fortunate to work elsewhere to get the experience from the outside and bring it in,” the younger Porto said.
The multimillion-dollar renovation of the old Sears Auto Center has been in the works since August 2019.
Construction began in January 2020.
The project was to be set on its heels several times due to changes in the ownership of the fashion center, city bureaucratic red tape, material and merchandise delays and COVID-19.
But Porto's business operations weathered the storm.
Within three days of California Gov. Gavin Newsom's call to shut down dine-in establishments to slow the spread of the coronavirus in March 2020, the popular Cuban bakery and café, famous for its meat pies, Refugiado guava and cheese pastries, cheese rolls and guava strudel, changed its business model.
Operations pivoted from dine-in only to online orders for in-car pickup for the first time in its 46-year history.
It also beefed up its `Bake at Home,' taking holiday orders on select frozen pastries shipped nationwide.
Last year, it started offering a limited number of