When Tony Cogliati says, “Making bread is my prayer, and when you eat my bread, that’s the sacrament,” he is serious. But there’s more than a single kind of serious. One is earnest and heavy; another is equally earnest but with the fun intact. Cogliati, is the latter.
Every Saturday and Sunday morning, he arrives on a patch of lawn behind Dell’Arte International in Blue Lake. Up goes the blue canopy, next the folding table to display his baked goods where everything costs the same. Loaves of sourdough bread or a gluten-free loaf? Five dollars. A bag of cookies? Five bucks. Jalapeño cheese bread? Five bones, and so on.
Cogliati welcomes his customers as if greeting friends, which many of them have indeed become. He tells the story of a customer who limits her carbohydrate intake. Her carbohydrate budget allows her to drink beer if she avoids most other carbs. But then she discovered Cogliati’s cookies. “I think she’s mad at me,” he jokes.
He is a comfortable man with a quick laugh and, clearly, retirement agrees with him. His face shows the years in the map lines of weather and time, clear eyes and a beard fading toward gray. He moves around his table with the grace you see in good boxers — selecting a bag of pita bread here, avoiding a canopy post there, all while making change, greeting other customers and acknowledging dogs, never hurried. “Getting in a hurry ruins the bread,” he says, with an emphasis on the metaphor for life.
Rain or shine, cold or windy, Cogliati always wears a kilt. Some years back, at his daughter’s Scottish-themed wedding, he discovered the sublime comfort in wearing a manly skirt. He was hooked. On a recent morning a customer complemented the purple fabric. The woman’s husband said, “Ah, purple, the color of royalty.”
“Yeah,” Cogliati said, “I’m a royal pain in the butt.”
Raised in a Catholic family, he had planned on becoming a priest. But then, in his early teens, he “discovered girls.” These days, his cathedral of choice is among the old growth redwoods of Stout Grove. His everyday church is the life around him. “It’s all right here,” he says, gesturing to himself, the sky, the street behind his bread stand.
Asked about his price, he has a little fun with the answer. Five is his favorite number, and the $5 bill is printed with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, his favorite president. Besides, people can’t count. One price keeps it simple. But one suspects the truth is about generosity.
Cogliati donates unsold goodies to the Blue Lake Family Resource Center. Once, after a particularly slow day, he gave away 70 loaves of bread. “I’m naturally inclined to help,” he says. And a big part of that is feeding people. His initial decision to open a bread stand was two-fold. He could both feed people and help his wife, Carlene. Her fine art had been displayed in various local galleries. But life as an artist is tough. One day she could be the artist de jour, and next day gone. Cogliati rented a room in Dell’Arte and turned it into her gallery. His breads pay the rent.
The most recent thing his bread making will fund is what he calls a black box theater troupe, or a “vagabond” troupe called the Hummingbird Project. “I don’t need the bread stand to supplement my income, he says. The idea is to use the profits to form a traveling team of actors, musicians and playwrights who will perform at venues like Dell’Arte and the McKinleyville Community Center. The money from his bread stand would pay for sets, travel and talent.
To this venture Cogliati brings a wealth of experience, including musical chops from having been in a band for many years. He writes songs and participated in the recent Humboldt Folklife Festival songwriters event. And his theatrical sensibilities run long and deep, having graduated from then Humboldt State University with a bachelor’s in theater and gone back for a master’s in playwriting.
However, back then at age 25, with two degrees under his belt, the gravitational pull of theater was strong, but the pull of marrying his sweetheart Carlene and starting a family was stronger. That meant no starving-artist hustle for him. He needed work that paid a livable wage and became a baker.
He’d loved making bread since his mother trusted him with all the makings in her kitchen. Applying for a job with no commercial baking experience didn’t faze Cogliati. “I’m not afraid,” he says. “I dive right in.” He took a job baking pastries at the former Youngberg’s restaurant in Arcata’s Jacoby Storehouse. But the gig was part-time work with low pay. At one point, he held down four part-time jobs. Eventually he and his new family moved to the Bay Area.
In Richmond, he found work at the Columbo Toscana Bread Co. Mario Maggiore, the resident bread maestro, mentored Cogliati and broadened his skills. “I’ve had some great teachers,” he says. He loved the work and loved learning, but when the company changed hands, he moved on to a baking career at Costco.
Today, Cogliati bakes at home in his Humboldt County-certified kitchen. He only uses olive oil and simple ingredients that would have been familiar to his grandmother and her grandmother. He is serious about making quality bread. But his kind of serious hasn’t forgotten the fun. Aside from the stand in Blue Lake, he also sells his breads and cookies at Seagoat Farmstand in McKinleyville, and his cookies at the Visitor Center of Sue-Meg State Park in Trinidad.
Recently, a customer at the stand asked, “How you doin’?”
Cogliati answered with a report on his well-being. “When I wake up, I think, ‘Good, what kind of trouble can I get into today?’”
Rick Geist (he/him) has been writing since dictating his first short story to his mom at age 6. He is currently working on a novel.
This article appears in Local Lit.