John Niță, a former pastry chef who built a successful career in communist Romania, left the country in 1981 and started a bakery in Brooklyn that now generates almost a million dollars in annual sales. The 84‑year‑old baker returned to Romania for an interview with Adevărul, where he reflected on his journey from the laboratories of Bucharest to the streets of New York. Niță grew up in a family that owned a pastry shop before the communist regime closed private businesses. His father ran the shop until the regime’s takeover, and Niță’s mother insisted that he attend a vocational school before working in the family trade. “Without school you can’t do anything,” Niță recalled. After three years of training he worked in several pastry laboratories, learning to bake cakes and create sugar decorations. By the age of 25 he was head of the Orizont laboratory on Drumul Taberei and later managed the pastry shop of the Theatre on Calea Victoriei. He also ran a central laboratory that supplied three districts of the capital, employing over 200 people and earning a monthly salary of about 4,000 lei. Despite the stability of his positions, Niță felt constrained by the communist system, which limited the ability to open private businesses and increasingly reserved leadership roles for Communist Party members. In 1972 he was forced to relinquish a managerial post for the same reason. “I didn’t leave because I had nothing; I left because I wanted more and it wasn’t possible,” he said. After the 1977 earthquake destroyed the building that housed his former shop, Niță decided to emigrate. He waited three years for permission to leave without renouncing his Romanian citizenship and arrived in New York on 13 August 1981. The first day in America, Niță began working in a bakery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He sought a shop to purchase, but the cheapest available was listed for $56,000. An Italian owner, who was retiring, agreed to sell the bakery for $42,000, allowing Niță to pay a $2,000 down payment and finance the balance in installments. “I bought the bakery with the owner’s money, essentially a credit,” he explained. He opened the European Bakery on 1 March 1982, later renamed Niță’s Bakery. The shop initially served Italian, Armenian, and American customers, but after 1990 the growing Romanian community in New York brought a steady stream of patrons seeking familiar pastries. Niță’s bakery gained wider recognition in 1986 when ABC produced a report on immigrants celebrating the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. The segment highlighted the Romanian community and featured Niță’s shop, which suddenly attracted attention from a broader audience. The bakery was also mentioned in a 1993 article in Curierul Românesc titled “Jofre și savarine românești la New York,” which noted that only 20% of the shop’s customers were Romanian at the time, the rest being Americans who had discovered the treats. Today, Niță’s son, Robert Niță, runs the bakery. The shop sells approximately 70,000 to 80,000 dollars in monthly revenue, translating to roughly 900,000 to 1 million dollars annually. It employs about ten people, many of whom are family members. Robert maintains the original recipes, including savarine, amandine, and jofre, and notes that many Romanian customers travel from as far as Florida and Los Angeles to purchase the pastries. He also observes that Romanians tend to keep larger quantities of baked goods in the freezer, a practice less common in Romania where fresh products are preferred. In 2022, after four decades in New York, Niță retired and handed over the business to his son. Robert’s nephew, Robert Junior, who had pursued a career in professional tennis, has since joined the family enterprise. He has introduced online marketing and plans to expand the brand to other U.S. cities and potentially open a new location in Romania. “We never had a website or marketing before,” he said. “Now we see an opportunity to reach customers beyond the existing community.” Niță’s return to Romania for the interview was a symbolic moment, as he revisited the site of the former Nestor pastry shop, now the Radisson Blu Hotel on Calea Victoriei, a building that survived the 1977 earthquake. He reflected on the journey that began in a small family shop, evolved through a state‑run laboratory, and culminated in a thriving business across the Atlantic.
Article source: Adev&acaron;rul | Image credit: Adev&acaron;rul