BY WENDY SODERBURG
UCLA Today Staff
When UCLA students sit down to meals at any
on-campus housing facility, they can bite into yummy homemade
doughnuts just out of a sizzling vat of oil. Or a variety of
fresh-out-of-the-oven muffins, cinnamon rolls, fruit-filled
Danish, croissants, scones, cookies and pizza made from scratch.
What they don’t know is that these mouth-watering
baked goods are made on campus every night while they sleep.
The people responsible for these delectable
delights are not the Keebler elves but Hans Elbel and André
Lehmann, two professionally trained chefs who supervise a staff
of seven full-time bakers in preparing 250 dozen cookies, 40
cakes, 60 dozen doughnuts and seemingly endless pans of brownies,
lemon bars, focaccia and corn bread each day. They provide nearly
all of the baked goods for 15,000 student meals daily, and they
manage to do it all well before their bleary-eyed clientele
stumble into their 8 a.m. classes.
“I don’t mind the hours at all,”
said Elbel after completing his midnight-to-11 a.m. shift. Lehmann
is not quite as enthusiastic. “You never quite get used
to it,” he admitted.
The younger of the two, Lehmann graduated from a government-run
culinary school in Basel, Switzerland, in 1980 and traveled
the world. During a visit to Santa Monica in 1987, Lehmann met
his future wife, Elizabeth, whom he married in 1989. The couple
lived in Switzerland for several years, returning to Los Angeles
to open a bistro.
“But then all the real-estate prices
went up, and the good locations got expensive,” said Lehmann,
with a laugh. So he became senior food service manager at UCLA
in 2000.
The German-born Elbel graduated from culinary school in 1959
and came to the United States the following year at the age
of 19. He worked as a pastry cook at the Plaza Hotel in New
York, then at Hostess Cakes and Wolf’s Pastry Shops in
Connecticut. In 1976, he arrived in San Pedro, Calif., to work
for Bavarian Specialty Foods. He also owned a bakery, “Bread
of France,” in Anaheim. After selling the bakery in 1990,
Elbel worked at UC Irvine until he was asked to set up a brand-new
bakery for UCLA’s Dining Services in 1996.
“For the amount of food they put out,
the satisfaction rate is phenomenal,” said Craig St. Louis,
assistant director of dining services. “In our last customer
survey, we were over 95% in customer satisfaction.”
Their secret? Teamwork.
“André and I work very well together,”
Elbel said. “The whole bakery is a team; it’s not
just the management. If we didn’t work as a team, it would
all fall apart.”
