Big Sur Fire Chief Matt Harris was in the station and smelled the smoke even before a call came in reporting a structure fire. He and a colleague saw a black plume of smoke and quickly started suiting up.
A call came in at 3:50pm on Friday, May 3 reporting the Big Sur Bakery was burning. Within five minutes, the two Big Sur Fire firefighters arrived from their headquarters on Post Ranch, located just behind the bakery.
The response was fast, but so was the fire. “It was pretty well involved by that time,” Harris says. “Our first order of business was to prevent it from spreading to other structures.”
On the latter, they succeeded. The other businesses on the property – a Shell station, Mother Botanical, Loma Art Studio and Gallery, and the event space Loma Vista Gardens – were unharmed. Same for nearby homes.
But the bakery itself was not so lucky. The original two responding firefighters – followed by 10 more volunteers, plus first responders from the U.S. Forest Service, State Parks, California Highway Patrol and an AMR ambulance (dispatched to all structure fires) – were able to stop the flames from spreading, but the bakery was destroyed. The fire started when the oven exploded due to a buildup of propane, firefighters determined.
The restaurant had been closed, with the kitchen operating only for recipe development and limited catering. The plan was to reopen over Memorial Day weekend, when Caltrans expects to allow 24/7 travel on Highway 1. Currently, the public is able to access Big Sur from the north, but only in convoys traveling on a one-lane, compromised portion of the highway at 7am and 5pm daily. Tourism is just barely trickling back.
The beloved restaurant and bakery occupied a historic building that has previously served as a hospitality hub.
It was the gardens that first drew Hillary Lipman to the place known as Loma Vista. “That’s why I bought the property, was because of the gardens,” he says. “It has always been a community gathering space.”
The development of Loma Vista got its start in 1908, after John Pfeiffer’s family created Pfeiffer’s Ranch Resort (which would later become Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park). Pfeiffer found resort life too busy, so he spent time up the road at Loma Vista tending bees and getting away from it all. (“It all” in those days was, by most modern measures, probably rather quiet.)
Alice Jaeger (a descendant of two influential Big Sur families, the Pfeiffers and the Posts) helped transform the beekeeper’s getaway into something more. She built an eight-room inn (later converted to the bakery) and opened Big Sur’s first gas station after Highway 1 opened in 1937. She also developed the gardens and a nursery.
One camellia Jaeger planted was badly singed, but otherwise the gardens made it through the fire.
“It’s been many things besides the bakery and it will be many things again,” Lipman says. “It was an inn and a cafe, and I built it as a restaurant. It was a beautiful old building. But the gardens are beautiful still.”