‘I make God’s gift to rugelach’: Grampa’s Bakery in Dania Beach reopening after year of pandemic shutdown
A pair of Big Apple bagel-shop veterans plan to re-open Dania Beach’s Grampa’s Bakery and Restaurant in mid-April as a New York-style diner, ending months of speculation about the fate of the 64-year-old institution.
The 6,000-square-foot Grampa’s Bakery building and land have been sold to Mark Fried, co-owner of Bagel Boys Cafe in Airmont, N.Y., and restaurateur Marc Goldberg, owner of 10 Goldberg’s Famous Bagels locations in the Hamptons. Records show that previous owner Carol Grampa, the widow of late bakery founder Ron Grampa, inked the deal Dec. 30 with Fried and Goldberg’s F&G Real Estate Holdings, LLC, for $1.85 million.
“These are two well-versed New York boys making the best nosh around,” says Dee O’Reilly, Grampa’s new manager. “It’s going to be epic and awesome.”
Now rebranded Grampa’s Bagel Bakery Deli Café, the greasy spoon at 17 SW First Ave., Dania Beach – closed since the start of the pandemic in March 2020 – is in the middle of a complete overhaul, adding new ovens, kitchen hood and a refreshed dining room. A large banner mounted outside the front door, where a dozen patio seats will be installed, has touted “Grampa’s Grand Reopening” since January.
Along with the Grampa’s building, the sale also includes the building next door at 64 S. Federal Highway, currently leased by a frozen-treat stand named Key West Shaved Ice. Fried said he intends to honor Grampa’s original agreement with Key West, whose lease goes up for renewal in 2023.
“I feel terrible because there must be 50, 100 cars that pull into Grampa’s parking lot every day, wanting us to serve them, and we keep saying, ‘One more month!’” Fried said as workers laid tile inside the bakery.
Fried said Goldberg had scouted the Grampa’s location for years. Over several weeks last fall, he said, they made multiple visits to the Hollywood home of Carol Grampa, who is reclusive and had resisted selling the bakery, to negotiate price. Eventually, Grampa stressed that the bakery should keep the family name.
“I would never change the name, anyway. Grampa’s is too powerful of a name,” says Fried, of Deerfield Beach. “Carol really wants it to stay ‘Grampa’s.’ I hope she comes in because she can have her own chair anytime she wants.”
On the Let’s Eat, South Florida Facebook group run by the Sun-Sentinel, where readers have gossiped about Grampa’s revival for months, longtime patrons painted a diner in steady decline since the death of its namesake, Ron Grampa, in January 2015. A state inspector shut down Grampa’s kitchen as recently as May 2018 for live roaches.
The revival of Grampa’s will serve only breakfast and lunch, doing away with Grampa’s dinner menu and signature complimentary Danish plate at breakfast. Diner staples, such as eggplant and chicken parmesan, will be offered sporadically. Beyond that, the bakery will serve black-and-white cookies, rugelach and Chinese cookies with recipes from the late Benny Pakula of Pakula’s Bakery, a Bronx mecca for Eastern-European treats. Sandwiches, including housemade corned-beef brisket, will use breads from Fort Lauderdale’s Gran Forno Bakery.
But Grampa’s array of New York-style water bagels – which are oven-baked, not steamed, imparting a crusty outer texture and chewy inside – will be sourced from Goldberg’s Famous Bagels. The rest of the menu will combine dishes from Bagel Boys Café with Grampa’s old recipes, Fried says.
“It’s going to have the corned beef and matzo ball soup like I do in New York,” he says. “We’ll have the pancakes and eggs and sandwiches that [Grampa’s] does. The rugelach will be ours – I make God’s gift to rugelach.”
The Grampa family originally debuted their storefront bakery on Federal Highway in 1957. A few years later Ron Grampa’s father, an Italian immigrant and mason, constructed the building where the restaurant now sits on Southwest First Avenue. The bakery survived two fires in the 1980s and 1990s. Grampa’s hit the national spotlight after its 2008 appearance on Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” which brought acclaim and a new generation of tourists to the roadside diner.
Grampa’s Bagel Bakery Deli Café will open in mid-April at 17 SW First Ave., in Dania Beach. Visit the bakery’s Facebook page.
