Crixa Cakes Was My Favorite Bay Area Bakery. Now It's Closing

For the past 15 years, my family has had exactly three Thanksgiving rituals: a potluck dinner with the Kaye-Hsu family, morning-after turkey jook and, most important of all, a deep-dish pumpkin pie from Crixa Cakes in Berkeley. Two of the Crixa pies, preferably.

What a marvel those hefty, thick-crusted beauties were — the filling sweet but not-too-sweet and preternaturally smooth; the tender, buttery crust plentiful (as the pastry gods intended) and slightly soggy on the inside. It’s as delicious eaten on a stomach completely stuffed full of turkey and green bean casserole as it is nibbled on sneakily, a day or two later, standing in front of the fridge at midnight. I’ve gone so far as to proclaim it the greatest pumpkin pie on earth.

You can imagine our collective distress, then, when we got word, via an email newsletter sent out two weeks ago and posted on the bakery’s website, that Crixa will be closing its doors for the foreseeable future after 27 years in Berkeley. Its last day of business will be Saturday, May 10.

In their note, co-owners Zoltan Der and Elizabeth Kloian said they “no longer want to do business with [their] landlord” and won’t extend their lease when it expires at the end of the month.

It marks the end of an era, then, for one of Berkeley’s most classic food institutions. Funnily enough, as much as I love that pumpkin pie, it probably wasn’t even one of the bakery’s most famous items. If anything, the summer pies — a gooey showcase for peak-season berries and stone fruit — are even more spectacular than the pumpkin. Beyond that, Crixa is an Eastern and Central European bakery first and foremost, specializing in hard-to-find, intricately spiced Old World delicacies like poppyseed kifli, plum-and-custard kolaches, saffron buns and kirsch-soaked vanilla chiffon cake.

What I appreciated just as much as the cakes and pastries themselves, however, was Crixa’s utter indifference to any kind of trendiness or ingratiation. Der and Kloaian ran the place with a brand of taciturn stoicism I couldn’t help but admire — always polite but never overfamiliar, even with longtime regulars. On Saturday mornings, I’d show up at around 11:30, when the pies came out of the oven; grab a number; and then wait patiently in the long, orderly line that curved around the outside of the bakery. God help the wayward customer who tried to cut in line for a pickup order, or otherwise subvert their carefully calibrated rules and systems: You’d get a stern talking-to, and you’d almost certainly deserve it.

Those kinds of idiosyncrasies only made me love the place even more. All told, Crixa has been my favorite bakery in Berkeley, the East Bay and quite possibly the entire Bay Area. And now it simply won’t exist.

In their farewell message, Der and Kloian did leave open the possibility of reopening in a new location at a future date. For now, however, they say they’ll focus on writing a Crixa Cakes cookbook and wrapping up their last few days of business. One thing’s for certain: The line outside the bakery these final days, full of Crixa superfans — myself included — hoping for one last slice of pie, will be as long as it has ever been.

Crixa Cakes is open Wednesday to Saturday, 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. The bakery’s final day of business will be Saturday, May 10.