Returning to Manresa Bread is icing on the cake for pastry chef

Longtime Manresa customers might recognize Stephanie Prida as pastry chef at the Michelin-star Los Gatos restaurant from 2012 to 2017. After six years, she’s back with Manresa Bread, in charge of expanding the pastry line and helping her longtime friend Avery Ruzicka move the bakery’s operation to a new commissary in Campbell.

“One of the reasons Avery wanted me back was I have experience working with teams and pushing people to own their opportunity,” Prida says. “A lot of young people don’t have ownership in their jobs. I’m here to say, ‘This is yours; you can own it.’”

Born and raised in San Diego, Prida didn’t set out to be a pastry chef.

“I wanted to be an artist and a painter,” she says. “My sister mentioned culinary school, so I enrolled in the Institute of Culinary Education in Los Angeles. One of the girls was doing catering on the side, and she asked me to do pastries. I really mastered lemon tarts. There are so many variations!”

She admits she never baked at all prior to culinary school. “I tried to make lobster bisque for my mom in a bread bowl. It was a disaster! Cooking a lobster at home when you are 17 is not as easy as it sounds.”

Prida got the Manresa job at a low point in her life. After a soul-crushing job in Chicago, she had moved back home to San Diego with no money and no job.

“I met up with a chef friend of mine who urged me not to leave the business. He said that David Kinch was looking for a pastry chef, and he put us in touch. David and I started emailing, and I drove up here with no money. Walking into the kitchen was so unique and so different; you could just feel it. David is such a charismatic genius. I came back and did a tasting and he called me the next day and offered me a job.”

While Prida says she could have spent the rest of her life at Manresa, she was in her lates 20s and longed to travel. She took a job with Major Food Group, a company with locations worldwide. “I was looking for a company that wanted to invest in me. It checked all my boxes.”

She moved to New York City and was soon flying all over, opening a total of 13 restaurants in Miami, Boston, Dallas, NYC, Las Vegas and Saudi Arabia. She thrived on the travel and the opportunity to meet people all over the world.

Then came March 2020. All the line workers at the restaurants where she was working in New York City, including The Grill and CARBONE, were let go. Only the executive chefs were retained to prepare food to go.

“I’ve never worked so hard,” Prida says. “We had no help; we were doing everything ourselves, and at a high level. They cut us to minimum wage, but I was thankful for something to do.

“We were super creative,” she adds. “We did CARBONE packages for rich people in the Hamptons and hand-delivered them. I would make whole carrot cakes and cheesecakes.”

While it was eerie living in a city that was silent, save for the sound of ambulances, she says, “I was around people all day in my job. I was so lucky.”

At Manresa Bread, she’s working seriously long hours to make the transition to Campbell happen, even in the midst of the Easter holiday preparation.

She’s perfecting a strawberry cream pastry, available for preorder. She’s also working on gluten-free blueberry muffins. “Nobody eats those in New York!”

Manresa Bread has locations in Los Gatos, Campbell, Palo Alto, Los Altos and Santa Cruz. Easter preorders for any location can be made through Wednesday, April 5, at https://www.manresabread.com. Pick-ups are available at all retail locations Friday, April 7- Saturday, April 9.