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The Berwyn mainstay known as Vesecky’s Bakery is closing after more than a century of serving up Eastern European baked goods the old-fashioned way.
The bakery at 6634 Cermak Road officially announced the closure on Facebook Monday morning. The post said Tuesday would be the bakery’s last day.
“We are so grateful to all of you for your support throughout the many years,” the post said.
By 9 a.m. Tuesday, owner Nancy Vesecky said the bakery was sold out. Customers had started lining up at 5 a.m., with the bakery opening at 6 a.m., and lines were “out the door,” Vesecky said.
Vesecky and her husband, David Vesecky, took over the family business from his parents in the early ’90s, she said. Vesecky herself is Polish, so she said marrying into the family and taking over the bakery was a good fit.
As the couple reached “retirement age,” Vesecky said they thought it was a good time to close the bakery.
“We want to do some traveling. We want to spend more time with the family and our grandchildren, just get to enjoy life a bit,” Vesecky said. “I tell everybody I haven’t been out on a Friday night in over 30 years.”
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The bakery first addressed the closure on Facebook in October in a post that said in part, “The rumors are true. We have decided to say goodbye to a significant chapter in our lives and retire.”
While retirement brings new excitement, the moment is still met with mixed emotions for Vesecky.
“It’s very bittersweet,” she said. “It’s been really hard saying goodbye. Everybody’s been so kind. It’s been a wonderful time here.”
Popular specialties found at the bakery over the years included a fruit-filled pastry called a kolacky, a sweet raisin nut bread known as houska — a personal favorite of Vesecky’s — and the rye bread. For years customers anticipated the bakery’s traditional St. Nicholas cookies at Christmastime. On Fat Tuesday, the start of Lent, customers would line up to get their hands on massive orders of paczki.
Eat. Watch. Do.
“We’re thinking of selling our recipes,” Vesecky said. “People want us to make a cookbook. We’re still deciding on that. You have to remember when we make things, we’re making it in pounds, quarts, gallons. We’ll make a couple hundred kolacky at a time. Everything has to be broken down.”
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The fourth-generation bakery first opened in Chicago in 1905, according to a post online by the village of Oak Park, and has been in the Vesecky family ever since. While the bakery held its mainly Czechoslovakian identity through the test of time, the menu had adapted to change, like offering a variety of Mexican cookies and seasonal pastries featuring guava to appeal to the area’s growing Latino population.
The family bakery moved from Chicago to Berwyn in the 1920s and soon became a habit for customers who were willing to wait in long lines for the breads, cakes, pastries and pies. A customer once told the Tribune that she waited three hours for her baked goods and said, “You can’t go home empty-handed.”