After serving spellbinding Eastern European pastries for nearly three decades, Berkeley’s Crixa Cakes is hanging up its apron on May 10. Co-owners Elizabeth Kloian and Zoltan Der have decided to end their 27-year run rather than continue dealing with their landlord. Their terse announcement didn’t mince words: “We no longer want to do business with our landlord.”
The Bay Area’s food landscape has been particularly unforgiving lately. In June, Concord’s beloved Mac’s Old House took its final bow after 42 years, with the owner retiring and hanging up his prime rib recipes. But unlike Mac’s planned exit, Crixa’s departure feels more like an abrupt eviction from our collective culinary memory.
The closure hits Berkeley’s food scene like a dropped soufflé – sudden, deflating, and impossible to salvage. Since 1998, Crixa has been the Bay Area’s portal to Hungarian, Russian, and Central European baking traditions, including an apple cake recipe from the 1720s that predates the American Revolution by half a century.
The bakery’s signature offerings – poppyseed kifli, plum-and-custard kolaches, and seasonal deep-dish pies – have amassed a cult following that crosses generational lines. Luke Tsai, a local food writer, crowned their pumpkin pie “the greatest on earth” with its “preternaturally smooth” filling and buttery crust. You know how some things get overhyped? This isn’t one of them.
And yes, watching people discover Crixa’s pies for the first time has been like witnessing someone experience their first Pixar movie – that moment when childhood joy collides with adult appreciation.
For Kloian, these pastries represent more than butter and sugar. Her Russian-Armenian heritage infuses everything coming out of Crixa’s ovens. “Food is sometimes all you have left,” she told Berkeleyside in 2023. “If you’re coming with what you can carry, what you’re carrying in your heart is what you left behind.” This philosophy explains why losing Crixa feels like watching a cultural archive vanish.
The bakery’s journey started in Oakland’s Fruitvale district before settling into its current Adeline Street location – a converted horse stable. The name “Crixa” itself comes from Watership Down, meaning “a crossroads of two horse paths” in rabbit language, an accidentally perfect metaphor for their current situation.
While Berkeley mourns, Kloian and Der have plotted their next chapter. They’re developing a cookbook featuring their most treasured recipes, though recreating their magic at home might be like trying to build IKEA furniture without the instructions or the right Allen wrench. They haven’t ruled out reopening elsewhere.
The scene outside Crixa these final weeks resembles a farewell concert for a beloved band – people waiting patiently for one last taste of something irreplaceable. Longtime customers have been flooding social media with tributes, many describing the loss as not just culinary but cultural. When we lose specialized bakeries like this, we’re losing living museums of food traditions.
For die-hard fans hoping to stay connected, the owners recommend subscribing to their newsletter for cookbook updates and potential resurrection news. In the meantime, Crixa maintains its Wednesday to Saturday schedule from 11:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. until the final curtain on May 10.
