When I arrived in the Bay Area, I was immediately made aware of and drawn to three matriarchal spaces: Alice Waters and her incandescent Garden of Eden. Bette Kroening, always front and center at her Fourth Street diner. And Ann Lauer, whose restaurant I ate at more times than I can count. After nearly 40 years in the comfort food business of pancakes, eggs, chicken apple sausage and red flannel hash, Lauer retired last year. While in the process of closing Rick & Ann’s, Lauer sold Ann’s Catering to four of her longtime employees.
Even though the restaurant has closed for good, the catering business reopened across town in Oakland. Ignacio Figueroa and Fausto Cuatlatl now oversee the daily kitchen operations. Sarah Armentrout manages the administrative operations, with Jose Ramirez Moreno responsible for inventory management. Collectively, the new owners have over 100 years of experience working for Lauer. Starry-eyed, I called Lauer to ask her about this transition and how she kept the restaurant’s magic intact for decades.
“I do believe that if you want to stay viable, you have to change,” Lauer said. “A lot of people don’t like change. It’s just not comfortable and you have to fight with employees to change, but I do like change.” As a restaurateur, she tried new things to test them out. “We always had to be conscious of trying to keep the quality because that’s hard. You have to have those hard conversations.”
Lauer launched Ann’s Catering as a separate business in 1994, five years after opening Rick & Ann’s, and later combined them into one corporation. But the catering initially started out as Rick & Ann’s Pantry. “That was a country market and a deli case,” Lauer said. “We had pizza by the slice, a lot of the things that we made at Rick & Ann’s, and then Odwalla had just come out and that was super popular.” Customers liked the Pantry, but foot traffic in the area wasn’t enough to sustain it.
When a friend in real estate suggested that she could make food for open houses, Lauer created 12 different menu platters. “Through doing that, somebody at the university [UC Berkeley] saw our stuff and wanted to find out if I would cater for their department,” she recalled. “And then we started catering for Berkeley, which was a huge, huge thing because there are so many different departments there.”
Armentrout confirmed that Ann’s Catering became a crucial part of the business. “People knew the name of the restaurant,” she said. “But Ann’s Catering held that together for so many years, too. We do so much with UC Berkeley, all the schools, churches, businesses, hospitals in the area. And the catering has just been growing and thriving more and more every year.”
In its current form, the catering menu comes in at around nine pages with just about everything on it. Breakfast pastry, brunch and bagel platters; dozens of salads and sandwiches; finger foods; main dishes; sweets, beverages and boxed lunches. “Actually, it used to be quite a bit larger,” Lauer said. “When we first started, it was huge. And it just didn’t make sense.” They subsequently streamlined the menus to make everything more manageable. “We just did a lot of things to make it run more efficiently because we were still in a very small space for the amount of business we were doing,” she said.
Lauer originally planned to sell the restaurant before the pandemic. And she also put a plan in motion to house the catering kitchen elsewhere. “And then Covid happened, and I needed to stay open because I had a lot of employees that needed the jobs,” she said. “I knew that I had four employees who wanted to take over when I was retiring. Then I worked with them for a year or two, just really meeting regularly and talking about the things that they’d have to be doing.”
On the day I spoke with Lauer, she’d made herself a smoothie for breakfast. But she does make pancakes and waffles, too. “I make everything, really,” she said. “I mean, I do like to cook a lot. I’m kind of feeling out how I want to do my cookbook. I’m having a lot of fun just cooking out of the garden and experimenting with things and playing with recipes.”
Ann’s Catering, 1167 65th St., Unit 101, Oakland. 510.649.0869. anns-catering.com
