New store gives bakery fresh start after 65 years
Three Brothers now has three locations
Hurricane Ike blew the roof off and water destroyed the building. But the deluge may have been a blessing for Three Brothers Bakery.
“It gave us an opportunity to rebuild and freshen up the store,” co-owner Janice Jucker said last week. “We truly reinvented ourselves. If you don’t evolve, you’re going to die.”
The rebirth of the 65-yearold bakery, a family-owned local institution, will have its most tangible expression Monday when the owners open the doors to a new Three Brothers Bakery. Unlike the two existing locations, this one will have a dessert and coffee bar and a patio. Dogs will be welcome outside and, with later hours, it will aim to be a neighborhood hangout in a booming part of town.
The Washington Avenue store will also be the family’s first to feature made-toorder cake parfaits, allowing customers to choose the type of cake, filling, frosting and topping. It’s a dramatic departure from the perception of Three Brothers as a place to pick up a loaf of rye.
The existing locations include a bakery in Memorial and the signature store near Meyerland, the one struck by Ike.
Janice Jucker is behind much of the change. She has increased the bakery’s online presence, boosted other marketing efforts and begun modernizing the cake design.
Her husband, Bobby
Jucker, a driving force in the business, is the son of Sigmund Jucker, one of the founding “three brothers” and the only surviving sibling.
Sigmund, his twin brother Sol, and Max Jucker survived Nazi Europe, and their Jewish family recipes go back almost 200 years to a bakery in Chrzanow, Poland.
Family bakeries are a dying enterprise, Bobby Jucker said, and he wants to keep his going.
That could be tough, said Chris Tripoli, president of A’ La Carte Foodservice Consulting Group. It is less common today for restaurant and bakery owners to hand their business over to their children.
“There are so many career choices out there, and the food service business is risky and horribly time-consuming,” he said.
Bobby Jucker’s children are pursuing other careers, and he said he didn’t want to force them into the bakery. It’s possible someone from their generation will one day take over, but he is working on possible succession plans, including franchising. More cake artists
Before Ike struck in 2008, the business was a little rundown and had not kept up with the times, Janice Jucker said.
“People used to think of us as just rye bread and gingerbread men,” she said.
Her solution was to hire additional cake artists. In 2010, Three Brothers was recognized by Country Living magazine for the “best mail-order pecan pie America has to offer.” Three years later, it was named Retail Bakery of the Year by Modern Baking.
Janice Jucker came up with the idea for the custom cake parfaits from scooping up crumbs and frosting at the Three Brothers bakery table.
“We’re always experimenting,” she said.
Since they bounced back from Ike five years ago, business has tripled, Jucker said, partly because of the Memorial store, which opened two years ago. She declined to share financial details.
Three Brothers has a combined 82 employees and expects to add several more at the new location.
Her husband grew up in Three Brothers, which he called “my playground.”
“I watched my dad and uncles make bagels and Kaiser rolls,” Bobby Jucker said. “I remember them yelling at each other a lot in Polish and Yiddish.
“They worked like dogs, 18- to 20-hour days,” he said. “My dad’s idea of a day off was to take off a few hours on Monday and pull us out of school to go to Astroworld.”
Max, Sigmund and Sol Jucker, and their sister, Jeanie Rudy, who also lived in Houston, had a total of 10 children, and most of them worked at the bakery.
Only Bobby made it a career.
San Antonio native Janice Goldsmith, 53, met Bobby Jucker, 54, at a regional BBYO Jewish youth group event when they were in ninth grade. She was love-struck, but he went on to marry someone else and had two kids. After his divorce they got together.
“We’ve been married 16 years,” she said, “but Bobby says it feels like five minutes — under water.”
If the oil business had not tanked in the 1980s, Bobby Jucker might not be at the bakery. He majored in petroleum land management in college, but the only energy job he could find was in Oklahoma, he said, so he joined the family business. Generations
Three Brothers customer Linda Freedman Block has gone to the bakery “since birth,” she said. Her grandfather used to enter through the back door at 6 a.m., before it opened, to take a box of sweets to work.
Three Brothers is part of every Jewish holiday, Block said. That means challah, or egg bread, on Shabbat. When a loved one dies, someone usually brings coffee cake from Three Brothers.
A Jucker family bakery was founded by Sigmund’s great-grandfather and later run by Sigmund’s grandfather and mother.
Sigmund Jucker wanted to excel at his craft, he said, and at age 14 he began learning from a man he felt to be “the best baker you’d ever seen.” ‘Kaiser rolls like roses’
“I learned from him how to make Kaiser rolls,” Sigmund Jucker said. “I make Kaiser rolls like roses.”
Under Nazi rule, the brothers were separated from their parents and sent to labor camps, where Sol Jucker almost died.
After the war the brothers learned their parents died at Auschwitz.
They came to New York, then settled in Houston. They opened a bakery on Holman in 1949, making breads such as rye and pumpernickel.
It took a while for Three Brothers to catch on, but once it did, “I was baking from 4 in the morning ’til 9 at night,” Sigmund Jucker said.
“I had lines 45 to 50 deep,” he said. “Even my friends had to take a number. Even when my wife came in I said, ‘If you want to talk to me, you have to take a number.’ ”
The bakery moved to 4036 South Braeswood in 1960, and Sigmund Jucker, now 92, worked there well into his 80s.
He recently visited the soon-to-open bakery and seemed pleased as he admired the cases filled with breads, Danishes, parfaits, cakes, cookies and hamantaschen.
It’s “beautiful,” Sigmund said, how his son and daughter-in-law have taken it to a new level. His mother in Poland never would have dreamed of such a place, he said.
“So much room to sit down and enjoy coffee and cake, and the display is gorgeous.”
“I’d like to work here, too,” he said. “I don’t drive, but if they pick me up I’ll be able to work. I can still do a lot of things in the bakery. I still can twist all of my egg breads. I remember everything.”