Trudy and Maurice “Mo” Kalisky opened Upper Crust in 1986. The Kaliskys opened their first storefront in Davis in 2019 and later opened in Winters in 2022.

“My parents had come to Davis in the early 1970s as graduate students,” Lorin, owner and executive chef of Upper Crust Baking, said. “They moved to Davis from New York City, and they missed the good bread and baked goods that they were used to on the East Coast at that time. When they were done with school, they had an entrepreneurial spirit, and my dad baked at home as a hobby for many years. By the mid-’80s, they had decided to try their hand at opening a bakery.”

Lorin later returned to his first job and led the charge for the last nine-plus years since 2016. He came home to help his parents after spending 14 years in Paris, France, where he met his wife, and his two daughters were born. He also spent years working in the San Francisco tech industry.

“In 2015, my parents were getting older and they had not put a lot of energy into the bakery for a while, they were struggling a little bit,” Lorin said. “It was a good time for me to get involved and they really needed the help. Over the course of a couple of years, we decided it would be good for me to take it over. That gave them the ability to retire.”

Upper Crust serves a unique selection of pastries, including French baguettes and Jewish deli rye. Lorin shares that their Sarmentine Baguette, a regional specialty from Bordeaux, France, is something unique and different from their menu.

“It is a little different from a regular, traditional French baguette because it’s made with some spelt flour and sesame seeds, and it looks a little different,” Lorin said. “It’s kind of split at each end, so it kind of has rabbit ears and it’s called a Sarmentine baguette, because in the Bordeaux region of France, after the harvest of the grapes for the famous Bordeaux wine, they trim the grape vines, and those trimmings are used for grilling and wood fired ovens and things like that. The wood is supposed to give food a really great flavor, and the trimmings are called sarments, and so the Sarmentine baguette is made to look like the trimmings from these grapevines. I always say it’s a baguette with a story.”

Lorin shares that they were excited when the opportunity came to open a location for their bakery in Winters because it is a great town with a lot of great businesses.

“We’re just committed to our community as we have always been very active in Winters. I always call Winters the jewel of Yolo County. It’s such a beautiful little town and has great businesses,” Lorin said. “We just love the community there.”

When the Kaliskys opened up their Winters location, they had no choice but to add another option to the menu. After taking over the former Lester Farms location, the Kaliskys added donuts to their menu at a very economical price.

“We’ve had a wonderful welcome to Winters,” Lorin said. “The community at large has been great. The funny story with Winters is that the property that we bought had been a bakery for many years. The community was used to having a bakery there that was very different from ours. They did pies and donuts, things like that. When word got around that we bought that property, people were excited because it was another bakery and not a yoga studio or something like that.”

Currently, they are offering their April specials for Easter and Passover. The bakery also offers pizza nights only at its Davis location at the moment, but hopes to soon have this in its Winters location.

Additionally, he says that they have big plans for Winters and have just installed an espresso machine to start offering coffee, and hope to also offer ice cream or frozen yogurt.“We’re gonna start offering a whole lot more in terms of coffee. We’ve been doing this in Davis for quite some time,” Lorin said. “We do a whole line of really great coffee drinks, and our coffee is kind of a special coffee. It’s a single-origin, Costa Rican coffee that the person who heads our coffee program imports the beans and roasts them himself. It’s his own brand that’s called Pura Vida, and so we have these just fabulous coffee beans.”

Upper Crust Bakery is located at 606 Railroad Ave. near the intersection with Route 128 in Winters. For more information about menu items, visit https://www.ucbaking.com/.