When I arrived in the Bay Area, I was immediately made aware of and drawn to three matriarchal spaces: Alice Waters and her incandescent Garden of Eden. Bette Kroening, always front and center at her Fourth Street diner. And Ann Lauer, whose restaurant I ate at more times than I can count. After nearly 40 years in the comfort food business of pancakes, eggs, chicken apple sausage and red flannel hash, Lauer retired last year. While in the process of closing Rick & Ann\u2019s, Lauer sold Ann\u2019s Catering to four of her longtime employees.<\/p>\n
Even though the restaurant has closed for good, the catering business reopened across town in Oakland. Ignacio Figueroa and Fausto Cuatlatl now oversee the daily kitchen operations. Sarah Armentrout manages the administrative operations, with Jose Ramirez Moreno responsible for inventory management. Collectively, the new owners have over 100 years of experience working for Lauer. Starry-eyed, I called Lauer to ask her about this transition and how she kept the restaurant\u2019s magic intact for decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do believe that if you want to stay viable, you have to change,\u201d Lauer said. \u201cA lot of people don\u2019t like change. It\u2019s just not comfortable and you have to fight with employees to change, but I do like change.\u201d As a restaurateur, she tried new things to test them out. \u201cWe always had to be conscious of trying to keep the quality because that\u2019s hard. You have to have those hard conversations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lauer launched Ann\u2019s Catering as a separate business in 1994, five years after opening Rick & Ann\u2019s, and later combined them into one corporation. But the catering initially started out as Rick & Ann\u2019s Pantry. \u201cThat was a country market and a deli case,\u201d Lauer said. \u201cWe had pizza by the slice, a lot of the things that we made at Rick & Ann\u2019s, and then Odwalla had just come out and that was super popular.\u201d Customers liked the Pantry, but foot traffic in the area wasn\u2019t enough to sustain it.<\/p>\n
When a friend in real estate suggested that she could make food for open houses, Lauer created 12 different menu platters. \u201cThrough doing that, somebody at the university [UC Berkeley] saw our stuff and wanted to find out if I would cater for their department,\u201d she recalled. \u201cAnd then we started catering for Berkeley, which was a huge, huge thing because there are so many different departments there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Armentrout confirmed that Ann\u2019s Catering became a crucial part of the business. \u201cPeople knew the name of the restaurant,\u201d she said. \u201cBut Ann\u2019s Catering held that together for so many years, too. We do so much with UC Berkeley, all the schools, churches, businesses, hospitals in the area. And the catering has just been growing and thriving more and more every year.\u201d<\/p>\n
In its current form, the catering menu comes in at around nine pages with just about everything on it. Breakfast pastry, brunch and bagel platters; dozens of salads and sandwiches; finger foods; main dishes; sweets, beverages and boxed lunches. \u201cActually, it used to be quite a bit larger,\u201d Lauer said. \u201cWhen we first started, it was huge. And it just didn\u2019t make sense.\u201d They subsequently streamlined the menus to make everything more manageable. \u201cWe just did a lot of things to make it run more efficiently because we were still in a very small space for the amount of business we were doing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Lauer originally planned to sell the restaurant before the pandemic. And she also put a plan in motion to house the catering kitchen elsewhere. \u201cAnd then Covid happened, and I needed to stay open because I had a lot of employees that needed the jobs,\u201d she said. \u201cI knew that I had four employees who wanted to take over when I was retiring. Then I worked with them for a year or two, just really meeting regularly and talking about the things that they\u2019d have to be doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the day I spoke with Lauer, she\u2019d made herself a smoothie for breakfast. But she does make pancakes and waffles, too. \u201cI make everything, really,\u201d she said. \u201cI mean, I do like to cook a lot. I\u2019m kind of feeling out how I want to do my cookbook. I\u2019m having a lot of fun just cooking out of the garden and experimenting with things and playing with recipes.\u201d<\/p>\n