The ovens are hot, aromas are wafting, and the staff is well-rested and marching headlong into the 51st year of the undeniably delicious goodness generated for half a century by world-renowned bakers at Bit of Swiss Bakery alongside Tosi’s Restaurant on Ridge Road in Stevensville.
Under the 30-year guidance of Tim and Pat Foley and founder Hans Kottmann before them, Bit of Swiss has become one of the most recognized names in Michigan baking history, and following a brief winter respite the bakery re-opens for business tomorrow morning, Thursday, January 25th, 2018.
For the Foleys, it all started in the fall of 1967. As Tim tells it, “My wife and I were working in Chicago, and we would come up on our days off to visit her parents and go to eat dinner at Tosi’s and there were rumblings that Hans wanted to sell the bakery.” I sat down with Tim on the day of his “Eve of the Eve” celebration at their Bread+Bar restaurant in Benton Harbor, and he says in the beginning, they were having this on again/off again relationship with Hans. Tim says, “His wife, Mary, really wanted to sell, and then he didn’t and she did, and then she didn’t and he did, so that was all over the course of about 8 or 9 months. Then one day, after Easter, he had worked like 28 hours straight and he fell, and then she was like, ‘Okay, that’s it! You’re working too much! This is it!’ So, we negotiated and closed on the deal on July first, 30-years ago, and we took over.”
The Foleys haven’t looked back since, turning Bit of Swiss into one of the most venerated institutions in the region with fans from all walks of life. But, it hasn’t been a simple cake walk, if you’ll pardon the pun. Tim says, “The first four or five years, I was training to be a chef, and I’d done pastries, but a bakery is an entirely different thing, what with making desserts and if you’re making desserts for a restaurant and whatever, and then get into actually baking cakes for more production than for just customers at a restaurant, so it was a total life-changing experience for us. For a long time I had worked nights, like noon to ten or noon to eleven, and then you’re working days and early mornings, so that was different.”
Foley calls the vibe of a bakery decidedly different from a restaurant, saying, “A restaurant gives you that adrenalin flow when you’re working on the line and people are coming in asking for this and that, whereas in a bakery it’s more of a situation where you have to have patience when you’re pushing your bread and you have to make sure that everything is scheduled and measured all correctly and that’s really important.”
Tim admits they were fortunate that Hans stayed on for two years once they took over. Unfortunately when he left, they also inherited an older staff, and they started to suffer from attrition right after Hans left, so they had to start making decisions as far as the long-term capabilities of the bakery. As a result he says, “We were in this constant re-training cycle for the first ten years or so, and back then we were closed January, February and March which originally we thought was great, but then when we started to try to hire younger people that didn’t really work out, too well. They don’t need three months of workers comp or whatever, so then we were losing people.”
Things really ramped up for Tim when he went to France for two weeks and got interested in artisan baking, creating breads and things like that. It was around that time that they started to develop their wholesale trade, which at that point was exclusively for Tosi’s Restaurant, followed by Caffé Tosi in downtown St. Joseph. He adds, “But then it was pretty much if you wanted to be viable year round, you’d have to develop more of a wholesale business. That’s when we started to get into the artisan bread, in the early 90’s when artisan bread kinda had a little bit of a movement going on. People were getting tired of soft white bread and things were slowly changing as people wanted to get more, new, fresh things, so we ended up being in the right place at the right time.”
Tim also notes that once they got into the artisan bread trade, “That pretty much took over everything that I was doing, so our thought was to push the artisan bread and develop that and then to also create some more wholesale customers that needed artisan bread. Then we ended up with a lot of early, early mornings, and late nights and a lot of testing and I traveled to a lot of friends bakeries all over the U.S., just to learn and pick up a few different items, things or processes like that. Then came 2002, after he’d been doing artisan bread for about 10 years and decided to try out for the U.S. Baking Team. He admits, “I just thought I’d try out for the experience, and then I won the regional, and then it was like, I won the national, and thought, ‘Oh boy, what did I just do!’ I didn’t expect it. I went in with a competitive mindset, but not with the confidence that says ‘I’m gonna win the whole thing…not like Verlander when he’s pitching.'” But he did win, nevertheless, and emerged as the Champion in Paris, France.
Regarding the international competition Tim says, “I think that one of the best things about being on the baking team is that you’re exposed to meeting so many people in the industry that have significantly higher credentials, who are willing to share their knowledge.” He calls it a real brotherhood of people that are bakers and says, “I think that we’re fortunate that I have a number of friends that if I have a problem with something now, I can call on them or if something new is coming out and I have any issues or want to try something new I can bounce it off of a couple of people, and get new ideas. I think that’s been very, very helpful for us.”
Tim says chefs and bakers have the mindset that “The better that we are, the better we all move our craft and when we can educate our customers, they will want a better product, and so with chefs, the more people that like good food, the more they’re going to go out, the more they’re going to try our restaurant or someone else’s, and they’re going to make decisions whether I like this one better or that one better.” He adds, “I think that it keeps all of us pushing to be better and better, all the time. When you stay on your toes and you watch the news and, my kids are in the industry now, so I watch them and what they’re doing, and I’m learning even from them, because they’ve got that younger perspective on things, so it’s good to be around them and listen to what they’re doing because it’s different than what we’ve done in the past, and we’ve tried to institute some changes like they do in their businesses, too.”
The Foley’s oldest son Matthew went to Arizona State and got a degree in tourism and business development, and interned at the Four Seasons in Scottsdale, then moved to Chicago and right now he’s managing a fine steak house called Maple & Ash on the Gold Coast.
Their daughter Lauren went to Auburn in Alabama and earned a degree in hotel & restaurant management and picked up an internship with the Four Seasons in Hawaii, and was on the big island in Hawaii for over a year with them. Now she works for the Revel Group and Limelight Catering in Chicago, an interesting company with three different venues that you can rent out or they will do your own party, or go to your house and do something. They do everything from dinner for ten at somebody’s house to a wedding, or corporate events for up to 2,000 guests.
The wholesale trade for Bit of Swiss has grown nicely and now takes in a lakeshore loop south to Michigan City and then over to South Bend and back. Tim says, “Our wholesale trade is about 55 to 60-percent of our business, and a very valuable part of it. We deliver seven days a week now, and the customers like that. With artisan baked offerings we’re in between being a mom & pop shop, and a highly industrial bakery, so some times it’s a little bit tougher for us to compete, just because we can’t offer a 2-inch, four-inch, six-inch, or 8-inch hoagie, we can do one size, and do it well, but we’re not somebody for everybody. It’s all about developing relationships with the chefs that we work with and the owners that we work with, and they make a commitment to us, and we make a commitment to try to give them the best quality product that we can.” Bit of Swiss wholesale products are delivered to hotels, casinos, coffee shops, restaurants, and grocery stores. All from a staff of about 35 dedicated workers creating good things for both the wholesale trade and for their own retail shop behind Tosi’s.
The Foley’s more recent adventure has been their Bread+Bar restaurant on Riverview Drive in Benton Harbor overlooking the St. Joseph River. Tim says the restaurant is doing very well, but adds, “It’s a work in progress, I think. We’ve learned a lot along the way, and we’ve been very fortunate that we started with a really good staff here, and we haven’t had a lot of people leave. We’ve tried to create good food, good service, nice customers, and I think it’s working out very well. We don’t lose a lot of people, we have a lot of the same cooks that we’ve had from day one, the wait staff, is the same, the bartenders are pretty much the same from day one, so that makes me feel really good as an owner that people appreciate working for me and the experience of what we do here.”
When I asked Tim what he likes most about his amazing businesses, he says, “I think for us it’s always the busier times that are my favorite. Not just because you’re hopefully making money, but I think that the build-up, the anticipation, the busy-busy days.” By way of example Tim says that the Christmas season is such a long process that really starts in October, with the planning and what they can do ahead of time and what they can’t do ahead. He says, “Because we have so much product that is sold in the last two weeks of December, we can’t just start everything on December 10th and say, okay, we’re ready to go.” He calls the whole process “stressful,” but adds, “It’s kind of fun with the planning, and this year we did some things differently, and we’re working towards trying to make the holiday times a little bit easier on our staff.”
For the restaurant, Tim says, “At Bread Bar we do special event dinners and things like that and so those are really fun for us. People appreciate those types of things that we do and we try to bring in good winemakers and things like that and we try to have food that pairs nicely with the wines and think that people are really appreciating those dinners.”
The Foleys are very much a team in their joint enterprises, and Tim says Pat is “So key to the entire operation,” adding, “She’s a very good planner, and she’s very good at keeping me focused on what we need to have done. She’s done a really good job of that. When we started opening up the bakery she was mixing the cakes and baking the cakes and decorating the cakes, and now she’s more on a management, ‘thinking-about-the-future’ type of role which is good for her.”
So how is it working together every day? Tim says, “There’s a lot of joy in working side-by-side with a spouse, and there’s also some pitfalls as anyone knows. My parents have worked together their whole life, and Pat’s mom and dad have worked together their whole life and so we both tend to come from families that are like that and so it’s a bit different of a relationship, so to speak, when you grow up and you just have to try to learn how to separate work from private life.”
As the crew at Bit of Swiss re-fires the ovens, Tim reflects back saying, “When we bought the bakery, I really didn’t know what I was getting into. I’d been in fine-dining, and was an aspiring chef at the time and really didn’t know what the future was going to hold. There were a lot of decisions that went into buying the bakery, but also the legacy that Hans left, and even to this day when people come in and say – I see people that have been coming in for 30 years and you get to know them – and they were obviously coming for ten or 20 more year before that and the legacy that he started and what we have tried to build on really makes you proud of what he started. That’s something that we never forget.”
Clearly the unprecedented success of both Bit of Swiss and Bread+Bar have proven that the Foleys and their teams are doing it right, and that’s a ringing endorsement in anybody’s book. Congratulations on 30 years at the helm, 50-years in business, and products that keep people coming back day after day, week after week and year after year in the heart of Michigan’s Great Southwest.
