Carole Griffin made her bones with bread. The local artist with a free-range imagination started baking artisanal loaves in the manner of French baking legend Lionel Poilâne back when Ronald Reagan was trying to convince us that ketchup was a vegetable. That accomplishment led her to start the Continental Bakery in English Village around 1984, and then the Euro-hash joint next door, the sublime and critically acclaimed Chez Lulu restaurant, in 1995.
Carole’s newest deal, Continental Bakery Downtown in the 4th Avenue spot previously used by Chris Dupont’s Mix, continues her tradition of cool cuisine and employs the space to present some truly esoteric entertainment. We felt it was long past time to converse on sundry matters, to learn the things you knead to know.
Weld: After all these years of shaping unruly bread dough, can you crack a walnut with your bare hands?
Carole Griffin: [laughs] I might could, but my grip is pitiful. Maybe I could break a board.
Weld: I feel a fool for not knowing this, but who was Lionel Poilâne?
CG: He is somebody you might be interested in looking into. He was a baker in France who, I believe, inherited his dad’s bakery. The baguette is basically a product of the Industrial revolution. It’s a fast-acting yeast and it depends on a mixer. It’s when mixers came into being. Baguettes are not considered—well, they’re just a little bit of nothing, really. They were considered fancy and great when they first came along, but it was because you had mixers. So Poilâne was one of the first people to sort of step outside the romance of the baguette and say, really, what my dad did was the real bread. Because they used to make bread in big troughs, and the way they would mix it is, you would [she demonstrates the kneading motion with her hands]. They would take these big batches of bread and, in order to develop the glutens, you would fold them over themselves. You don’t have the advantage of a mixer that just sits there and develops the glutens.
A baguette doesn’t last more than a few hours. The sourdough bread that was made previous to that, the bakers would make the village ovens available to everybody once a week, so everybody would build these starters, these slow breads that would come to fruition at the end of the week. They would take these big, four-and-a-half-pound loaves, bake two or three of them and they would last the whole week. They would take one little piece from that and start to develop for the next week, when the ovens would be available again.
So that is what we did with those breads. Lionel Poilâne was the first person to pioneer that in France. I returned to those more ancient, more traditional breads.
Weld: That’s where your style of baking came from?
CG: I think what happened was, I had a friend—do you know Serge Bokobza [chairman of UAB’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures]? Serge brought a loaf of Poilâne bread home, because he loved Poilâne bread—it was either Serge or my friend Christophe, who was a friend of Serge’s, who brought me a loaf of that bread. I tried it, we ate it together, it was like, that’s cool, and it was consumed and that was it.
But several years later, I started experimenting with natural starters, and I found myself really driven—have you seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind? You know how they built those little pyramids of mashed potatoes and they don’t know why? I had this compulsion. I was heading somewhere with this bread and I just became obsessed with it. When I finally completed it, I thought, that is the most beautiful bread I’ve ever seen, the smell of it, it was completely unconventional. The development of that bread was so strange. I’ve read many millions of books to try to find something that was similar, but nobody does it the same way that I came up with, because I just came up with it out of my brain in a crazy way.
I figured nobody would really get it except for Frank Stitt [oft-honored mastermind of Highlands and Bottega restaurants], and we were doing his bread for him at the time, so when I finished, I thought, I’m gonna go show Frank. I came into Bottega—I think it was Bottega, yeah, because I remember walking through the café with that bread like this [she mimes carrying the loaf in triumph]—and walked into the kitchen. Frank looked at it and he was like, oh my goodness. He stopped everybody in the kitchen and made them come central to the kitchen. He put it on a table and he said, “This is Poilâne.” And then I realized what had been working on me, the vision of it, because I had not intended to recreate that loaf. But it is very similar, actually.
Weld: Should I be worried about gluten at all? I’ve read frightening words about what it will or won’t do, and I don’t have a celiac disorder—
CG: Um, that’s kind of a delicate topic—
Weld: Then just say, no, don’t worry. That’s all I want to hear.
CG: Then I’m not worried at all. I’m very concerned about people who have celiac disease, but I think there’s still a lot to be discovered about that…I’m don’t feel mercenary at all about it, or like I’m trying to defend my livelihood, because it seems to me, the more people sort of deny themselves bread, we might go through little periods where we don’t sell as much bread, but, man, people just get desperate for it. But I think also that the fermentation process that it goes through with the natural starter sort of counterbalances some of the problems.
Weld: Plus I’m guessing that you don’t add the 38 other things commercial bread makers add to their bread to make it last indefinitely.
CG: That does actually make a huge difference, like bromination and all that.
Weld: About your new downtown venture—I vaguely remember that you had kinfolk who worked downtown in the old days.
CG: My pee-paw. His name was C.L. Griffin. He was from Gurdon, Ark., and his name was Charlemagne Lamar Griffin, but his actual name, Charlemagne, was spelled “Charlie Maigne.” We named my son his name. I let him spell it the normal way, but we put it on his birth certificate the other way.
Weld: So how does downtown look to you today, compared to what you saw when you were a kid and C.L. had an office in the Lyric Building?
CG: It’s funny because I mostly remember the pigeons. I used to daydream about the pigeons when I was in school. And I remember Joy Young’s [a Chinese restaurant on 20th Street]. Do you remember that? But he was in the Lyric Building on the fourth floor, I think. They had these big windows, and you could sit right on the ledge, dangle your legs out four stories and watch all the parades that would go by…
When [Continental Bakery Downtown] moved into this neighborhood, Glenny Brock, who I adore [among other things, founder of Friends of The Lyric Theatre], came over and said, “You need to come with me right now, come over to the Lyric Theatre and just inhabit this space with me.” Construction was about to begin and nobody would ever see it like this again. So we went in and looked around, it was sensational. As we were going up the stairs, we passed a hallway that looked like it went into some dark recess. I was like, what the hell is that? She said, “That’s the Lyric Office Building.” I said, “Can we go in there?” She said, sure.
We walked in, and the minute I crossed that threshold, the green tile on the floor and the marble, all the smells and the elevator and the trim on the stairs, the feel of the railing—it just made me want to cry. She had said there were a couple of old businesses in there that were completely preserved. I told her that my grandfather used to have a business in there. I couldn’t remember the name; I thought it was Cotton States Life. So I called my dad while I’m walking through the building, and I was like, Dad, what was the name of Pee-Paw’s business? He said, Southland Insurance. Glenny was like, oh my God, that’s one of the ones. I said what floor was it on and he said the fourth floor and she was like, oh my Lord!
We started going up the stairs, and I’m talking to my dad, and I get to the top of the stairs and turn around. At the end of the hallway it says Southland Insurance. It had a heart on one of the side panels that said “Heart of Dixie” and it was perfectly preserved.
The coolest thing was, it was just me and Glenny in that building, and I was like, Dad, Dad, it’s Southland. All of a sudden, on the phone, I could hear him, he started crying. Of course that made me start crying. I walked through the whole office…it was the most strangely moving experience. Like Proust or whatever.
Weld: Do you see your new digs as part of the so-called revitalization of downtown or just more of the Carole Griffin empire?
CG: [Laughs] Oh, my Lord. I feel like I have a relationship, obviously, to downtown…but my politics really drove me for a long time to want to get back down here, to get out of the suburbs and be part of the revitalization.
I had so many customers who said, “Don’t you dare, it’s too speculative and it’s not ready, it’s not there yet.” … There’s a weird thing about this place because when we were setting it up everybody kept saying, “How’s that going to work?” When we opened the doors I realized I had sort of an art project here and I just said, “Here it is.” … I feel that it’s hard to categorize what’s happening here. It’s hard to come up with a language for it.
Weld: One of my favorite serendipities of all time was walking into Tipitina’s one night in New Orleans and seeing the Sugar La-Las [a great band for whom Carole once sang sumptuously] on the stage. I had no idea you were going to be there and it hit me like a big burst of Birmingham. Do you ever miss being in front of a band, that kind of energy?
CG: I guess I have some bittersweet memories. There was a lot of it that I was not crazy about but there was a lot that was really fun. The lifestyle that went with it was sometimes very challenging. For one thing, traveling out of town so often. [The late] Mots [Roden, creative spark and guitarist of the La Las] was a traveling companion, and he just didn’t like staying out of town. He was a homebody. We would have to leave at two or three in the morning and drive back, and I was such a scaredy-cat. I didn’t like driving when I thought everybody else on the road was drunk. I used to wear a crash helmet in the car. Me and Leif [Bondarenko, the peerless drummer] were the designated drivers, because I was not a drinker, so I would always drive us home. It’s not exactly the rock and roll image….
Weld: I wonder what image you would assign your Continental Bakery Downtown.
CG: I think there’s a weird thing about this place, because when we were setting it up, everybody kept saying, how’s that going to work? We had to do it rough-and-tumble for two weeks. I had no idea what we were doing, really. It was so frightening, because when we opened the doors, I realized I had sort of an art project here and I just said, here it is. I don’t know why it came together. I feel that it’s hard to categorize what’s happening here. It’s hard to come up with a language for it.
Weld: Well, besides the language of good food and good surroundings, there is the language of music. You look at the musical menu here and you’re bringing in performances I can’t remember any other venue in town ever attempting. Just recently, you’ve presented amuse-bouche poetry, Russian folk songs, Persian classical music, flamenco dance and a piano rendition of Peter and the Wolf for the vernal equinox. This is cosmopolitan stuff.
CG: Plus we’ve had tango, a salsa dance—we had a French-Moroccan cellist to do beautiful little improvised pieces.
Weld: Are you bringing in music that you want to hear, or are you thinking it would be fun to introduce this music to a lot of people?
CG: It’s stuff I’ve always been interested in. From this standpoint: I like things that are human scale. I mean, this is sort of me, being able to look back and be a little bit analytical about it, but even with the Sugar La Las, what we did, there was not a lot of pyrotechnics. It was almost like theater or vaudeville. Every performance was different and we used our minds to—like, the first show we did, I was like, why don’t you carry me in on a bier? We dressed up. I would put Vaseline on my eyelids and get a thing of glitter and smash it into them. It was like that. It’s all sort of repurposed and human scale. Those sorts of feelings of gettin’ real, gettin’ into the moment.
Weld: I think of it as music, pre-amplification. That if you had visited a café in Montmartre at the turn of the last century, there might have been the flamenco, there might have been the Persian classical music.
CG: Yes. Rather than us going to a big theater where you’re very far away from the music or you look at a Jumbotron…in here, you bring the arts to the people. Most of the instruments and the kinds of performances we have been doing here — those instruments were designed to be experienced acoustically, not electronically.
Weld: So what can we expect to be hearing at the Continental Bakery Downtown in the foreseeable future? Do you just improvise, saying, “This week I think I’d like to see something Portuguese?”
CG: Well, it started that way, but it’s hard to get the word out to people. It was amazing how cooperative people were to show up and play, and those have been lovely events, but we found if we give people a little more heads-up, they’re more appreciative.
Weld: All right, our big closing query. You are widely known for displaying a sense of joie-de-vivre. How do you get all that joie out of vivre?
CG: That’s a weird question, man…that’s a hard question to answer. I think that there is joy, and I think that if you are available to what is actually happening, that’s the way it is. You know, my heritage is Czech. Did you know that? I feel like my mom sort of kept us connected to that side of the family, and that is a lusty bunch right there, oh my gosh: 3-hour dinners and a boatload of food on the table and everybody’s arguing and politically everybody is vivant and engaged. Being engaged. I think that there’s joy in that, and I’ve had the good fortune to have that illustrated to me through my growing up in that way. It’s like, isolation breeds a kind of anxiety!
Upcoming Continental Bakery Downtown events include a live reading of The Life of Brian on Good Friday, a new Max Rykov talk show called “Are We There Yet?” on April 8, and a showing of the movie Fantastic Planet with musical accompaniment by Holly Waxwing and HeLen April 24; details on the CBD Facebook page.