I’ve driven by the Helms Bakery complex in Culver City hundreds of times. The sign boasting the official bread of the 1932 Olympics still stands tall over the building. But for the first time since the bakery shut its doors in 1969, loaves of bread are rising again at Helms.
Sang Yoon, the chef behind Father’s Office , opened a reimagined version of the bakery in the Helms complex, right across from his gastropub and down the way from his now-closed modern Southeast Asian restaurant Lukshon , which reached No. 3 on the Times’ 101 Best Restaurants in L.A.
list of 2016. The bakery project, which Yoon says he’s been dreaming about for over a decade, finally came to life on Friday morning. “Mentally it’s been 12 years in the making,” says Yoon, walking around the bakery.
“Construction lasted about two years. It’s kind of a cool thing there is a Helms Bakery now. For another generation.
” If you’re in a certain age bracket, you may remember seeing the delivery trucks driving around Los Angeles. While Yoon doesn’t plan to have a wholesale business or bring back the yellow-and-blue trucks, he did build out a 14,000-square-foot space that includes separate areas to house a coffee bar, kitchen, downstairs bakery, upstairs dough room and a large center market area with cold and hot prepared foods and an elite selection of snacks. Every couple of minutes, the entire room turns its attention to a flipboard on the back wall.
It flutters to life, then displays the da.