Jeffrey Brown in baking mode (Courtesy photo)
Food | East Village
‘PHOTOGRAPHER-TURNED-BAKER WOWS CUSTOMERS AT IZOLA’
By Frank Sabatini Jr.
East Village resident Jeffrey Brown never imagined he would one day bake croissants and sourdough bread for a living.
After working as a photojournalist in Chicago and then running a commercial photography company in San Diego over the past 30 years, he unexpectedly veered into the bakery business with the 2020 opening of Izola.
Located on the third floor of The Ratner building in the East Village, the bakery occupies his former photography studio. Brown’s business model is unique in that it offers a super-concise menu; carries an openly progressive agenda; and serves as a diverse social space when it’s in operation each week from noon to 6 p.m., Wednesday through Friday, and from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays.
We caught up with this now-specialized baker and socially conscious entrepreneur between dough proofings to learn what keeps Izola buzzing.
Downtown Condo Guys: Are you the sole owner of Izola?
Brown: Yes, although I view my life partner, Jenny Chen, as a co-founder. During the beginning of the pandemic, before we opened, she and I sheltered in place as I started learning how to make sourdough bread and butter croissants. She’s a full-time merchandiser for a jewelry business.
Downtown Condo Guys: What led you into opening a bakery, especially just months into the pandemic?
Brown: We were in France vacationing for a few weeks and got run out of the country by Covid when it hit. I remember being in our Airbnb in Paris when we found out flights were canceled and the U.S. border was closed temporarily. But we were able to make it back.
We had come home to a changed country. And it caused me to reflect on what I wanted to do here. So we decided to build a community. And that’s what Izola is all about. We provide people a place where everyone is seen and the experience of coming in here is a happy place.
As for deciding on starting a bakery, it was an obvious choice after walking around Paris with a map of famous bakeries in our hands. I love watching people’s heads go back and their eyes close when biting into a hot croissant or a slice of fresh sourdough.
Downtown Condo Guys: Did you have any baking experience prior to this?
Brown: No. I failed my way into making good croissants and sourdough bread. The process of learning took about five weeks. I had built a Google spreadsheet for making and evaluating recipes. A life-changing croissant is the summation of a thousand decisions. I still feed that Google spreadsheet today. By the time we got our license from the health department, I was making only 12 croissants a day for the bakery.
Downtown Condo Guys: Why the name ‘Izola?’
Brown: It was the name of my late grandmother, Izola Eaton. She was a baker and a farm wife where I grew up in Kansas.
Downtown Condo Guys: Tell us about your background in photography.
Brown: I first went to engineering school in Colorado and then pursued a career in photojournalism. After that I started working as a photojournalist in Chicago, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1997. In 1998 I moved to San Diego and started a commercial photography and filmmaking business called Tallgrass Pictures. It was my sole occupation until June of 2020. I’m currently on a sabbatical with that since running Izola, which is where I want to spend the majority of my focus.
Downtown Condo Guys: How many different types of breads and croissants do you sell?
Brown: Our menu is very narrow with both. We have five flavors of sourdough such as garlic, which contains 25 percent whole roasted cloves in each loaf. We also have a seeded multi-grain, and a wild sourdough that captures the wild yeast with a starter made in-house. People can sample the variety in our sourdough flights. It’s a platter of three half loaves for $15.
For the croissants, we have a half-dozen different ones such as butter, chocolate, almond, and Moroccan black olive, which is our wild-child croissant. It has a single bar of chocolate in the middle. It’s salty, a little sweet, and earthy.
Every week we sell a couple thousand croissants and about 200 sourdough loaves. We expect to triple that capacity by the end of November once our two-deck Salva oven arrives from Spain.
Downtown Condo Guys: Given that you’re located inside a large building on the third floor, how did you keep the business afloat during Covid lockdowns and strict regulations?
Brown: I would lower down a picnic basket from the window that was filled with warm croissants and bread, and customers would put their money in it. We did that for eight months. People loved it, so we may bring it back.
Downtown Condo Guys: Your website says the bakery ‘amplifies the voices of the marginalized.’ How so exactly?
Brown: We are a progressive organization and our core principles are about environmental, economic, gender, and sexual-orientation justice. Everyone is welcome here. And we strengthen our community by donating unsold goods to homeless shelters and senior citizen centers. Also, I’m a member of the LGBTQ community, and we helped raise funds for the LGBT Community Center in Hillcrest by selling Tahitian vanilla knots during the 2021 Pride weekend in July. We were selling them online and at the bakery.
Downtown Condo Guys: Do you plan on expanding into other areas of San Diego?
Brown: Yes, our mission is to change the way Americans experience bread and croissants. We want to bring this into other San Diego communities. I’d like to have satellite bread cafes in San Diego in the next two years, where we are baking fresh all day with dough from our central kitchen. I’d love to place one in Little Italy, National City, and La Jolla.
Downtown Condo Guys: What is the most important lesson you’ve learned about running a bakery?
Brown: Baking is an ecosystem. It’s about putting a trained team and working equipment in place. It’s a symbiotic relationship with the customers.
