Sad

 

Borrachini Bakery, Seattle

When we finally come up for air, it's going to be a different Seattle. The old, eclectic, funky and fun city was already disappearing before the pandemic, and now the pace has only picked up.

The iconic Borrachini's Bakery on Rainier Avenue is the latest casualty, closing after almost 100 years in business.  It's the classic immigrant-made-good story, started in 1923 in the basement of a home by Mario Borracchini, a baker who arrived here from Tuscany.

In 1910, 45% of Italian-descent Seattleites lived in the Rainier Valley, an area known as “Garlic Gulch.” The early Italian immigrants moved here to work in the coal mines south of the city. Later they worked in farms and construction or started small businesses. 

Remo Borracchini was born eight blocks from the bakery. In the early days, they baked more than 50 kinds of bread, and he always boasted about the family’s refusal to accumulate debt.

“Italians don’t believe in debt,” Borracchini said. “We’ve never had a debt in this building in 85 years.”

In recent decades, they were really in the party business, selling dozens of decorated cakes a day. The problem with that is no one has been gathering over the past year to have those parties. So the family made the hard decision to close permanently.

Back in 1993, Remo told the Seattle Times they were making around 110 wedding cakes every weekend. He figured it out that on any given Saturday, "13,780 people were eating Borrachini wedding cakes in Seattle.”

And that included us, married on February 27, 1993. 

I remember going down to the bakery with Amanda (a grumpy teenager at the time) and ordering a cake from their enormous book of selections.  So many choices of flavors, fillings, colors and size! I asked for "blue flowers" and quite pretty it was.  Right before our reception, a young man delivered it right to the house and carefully assembled it. Such service.

It's a sad day when you can no longer get a Borracchini cake in Seattle. Within 5 hours of posting the closure on their Facebook page, there were a 1,000 comments of fond memories.