The following story originally appeared in the January issue of Richmond magazine, on newsstands now.
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Mario Dawson, Argentina Ortega and Jorge Dawson (Photo by Dominic Hernandez)
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The bakery brimming with fresh, hot loaves of bread and pastries (Photo by Dominic Hernandez)
If you see Argentina Ortega this month, chances are it won’t be for long. She’ll be moving — and fast.
Among the many tasks on her January agenda was to churn out more than 300 cylindrical rosca de reyes cakes topped with candied fruit, a figurine of the baby Jesus tucked tenderly inside. Just like the king cakes consumed during Mardi Gras, rosca de reyes cakes are eaten all over the Spanish-speaking world on Jan. 6, also known as Three Kings Day, the date that marks the Epiphany.
Even without taking on the burden of baking 300 cakes for a growing community, Ortega’s bakery, La Sabrosita (translation: The Little Tasty One), is a daily blur of activity.
More than just a place to pick up fresh bread, tarts and cookies, the utilitarian space functions as a kind of unofficial community center, bringing together the many Latinos scattered across the city and counties. While white Anglos may see a monolith of people in the term “Hispanic,” the shelves at La Sabrosita tell a different story. El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic — Ortega is feeding all of these communities with the baked goods particular to those cultures.
Her business has grown steadily in the 12 years since she opened, buying an existing bakery from a relative through marriage — a testament not just to her hard work and skilled baking, but also to an immigrant population that has boomed. According to census data compiled by the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at VCU, the current Hispanic population in Richmond and surrounding counties is nearly 76,000 people — up from 43,500 in 2007.
“When we started, we had two pastry cases with only concha, cuerno, quesadilla and bread pudding,” Ortega recalls. “Now we need more room.”
Photo by Dominic Hernandez
For Ortega’s core constituencies, her selections are meant to recall the comforting tastes of home. She says she has learned, however, that nostalgia isn’t enough. Even with the vast array of selections — including sponge cake with caramel and wine; Salvadoran cheesecake; gingerbread marranitos cookies; Mexican polvorones cookies; alfajor cookies; tres leches cake; and a daily selection of croissants, danishes, doughnuts, and elephant ears — her clientele can be demanding.
“Is it hot?” a customer asks Ortega in Spanish, walking over and pointing to the rolling shelves stocked with a dozen metal trays, each with a dozen cylindrical rolls lined up in two rows.
“In our culture,” Ortega explains, “we expect [bread] to be hot.”
A bakery worker removes trays of sitting conchas, scored with a bright, crosshatched sugary grid of piloncillo coco (pink- or yellow-colored sugar), and replaces them with a full hot tray. The dry, sweet bread will later be dunked into a cup of hot café con leche, hot chocolate or milk in households around the region.
In the afternoon, customers stream in for the pan dulces (sweet breads), all priced under $2, that fill the cases along the walls.
When she opened in 2005, Ortega, who ran a private transportation company in El Salvador, was not just the baker; she was also the delivery person and the cleaning lady. She weathered the bad economy in 2008, as well as a fire that took the bakery six months to recover from, bringing in sons Eduardo, Mario and Jorge to acquire a loan and expand the business.
Still, the seven-day workweeks did not go away. Much of that can be attributed to Ortega’s need to get the details right — like sending a driver to New York City to buy cassava flour for a Colombian bread. “It was expensive,” she says, “but it was the only way.”
Today, three drivers make deliveries from the 8,000-square-foot space to as many as 10 stores a day, some with repeat visits throughout the day. In all, La Sabrosita’s baked goods can be found in 150 stores around the region, from ethnic specialty shops to 7-Elevens. Ortega’s staff now includes eight bakers and four packagers. Three staffers churn out 15 to 20 special-occasion cakes a day during the week, with 50 to 70 cakes going out the door each Saturday and Sunday.
A food-world force, in other words.
Yet outside the city’s Hispanic communities, this nearly round-the-clock bakery might as well be an obscurity, a hive of activity in a world the dominant population rarely, if ever, intersects with. A world apart.
It is, however, an eminently accessible world, and a vast one, too, with so much to be discovered, and savored.
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