Sweet success

Pastry chef Barbara Massey mixes passion for baking with love of horse jumping

By CARON GOLDEN

If you don’t yet know who Barbara Massey is, it’s pretty much by design. You’ve probably eaten her French-inspired pastries at Tartine, the homey cafe near the Ferry Landing. She’s the head pastry chef there and one of the restaurant’s partners, along with Jenny Freel and Mary Ann Berta. But unlike Freel and Berta, who are more visible fixtures in Coronado and were the longtime faces of the gourmet gift store In Good Taste, Massey prefers to fly under the radar — specifically in the kitchen.

The three women opened Tartine in October 2001. None had worked in or run a restaurant before. But Massey came to the project with a passion for baking and the patisserie skills she’d been honing since she was a child and later refined as a student at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

“My maternal grandma was a baker,” Massey explained. “We’d make jam together. We’d make cookies together, all kinds of stuff.”

In fact, the coffee cake at Tartine is her grandmother’s recipe. But her baking experience expanded beyond her grandma’s teaching, even as a child.

Massey, who is in her 50s, was born at Naval Air Station Lemoore in California’s Central Valley, where her dad was a Navy pilot. When Massey was 8, her dad was assigned to a post in Germany, where the family lived for three years before moving to England. Weekly riding lessons in England developed her lifelong passion for horses.

“In England, we did a cookery class,” she recalled. “The scones here are an adaptation of a recipe from my sixth-grade cooking class.

“It’s just something I’ve always done to fill my time. It’s a fun, creative outlet. It’s a new way to express yourself, and there’s something very satisfying about creating things and sharing them,” she said. “And the reception is usually pretty good. No one complains when you bring them a sweet.”

When Massey was 14, the family settled in Coronado, the family’s longtime home base dating to her dad’s childhood when his father was a naval officer.

Massey graduated from Coronado High School in 1987 and got a degree in communication studies and English literature at the University of San Diego, thinking she wanted to be a journalist.

“So, not at all the right basis for having a business and becoming a pastry chef,” she joked.

“The first thing I did when I got to USD was to go to all the study abroad meetings,” she said. “I spent my whole sophomore year in England at a small liberal arts college in Oxford called St. Clare’s.”

She may not have become a journalist, but her education, she said, did give her the tools to do all the written communications for Tartine.

It was in her junior year at USD that Massey realized she wanted to become a chef and study pastry in Paris. To make that happen required some strategic thinking.

“When I decided that I wanted to cook, I realized I should probably learn French,” she said. “So, the summer between my junior and senior year, I went to France and nannied for two different families to learn the language.”

In the fall of 1991, after she graduated from USD, she moved to Paris and lived with one of the families she had been a nanny for, taking care of the kids part time while attending Le Cordon Bleu.

For Massey, it was the beginning of a period of nomadism, which she attributes to her childhood moves. Her next adventure was in San Francisco working as a restaurant pastry chef for two years before her desire to roam struck again. She decided to join the Peace Corps and was sent to Jamaica, which she fell in love with, and stayed just over a year.

“Initially they wanted to send me to West Africa, which in hindsight probably would have been a better place for me to go,” she reflected. “But I ended up going to Jamaica, which is a very interesting country in itself. I still go multiple times a year because it’s like a second home to me.

You make these assumptions that because you’re in an English-speaking country, it’s going to be very similar to ours, but the culture is completely different.”

And it won her over. Because Massey spent so much time in England, and Jamaica remains a Crown colony, she said she felt an immediate tie to it. She laughed and cited an old Jamaican tourism slogan: “Once you go, you know. If you go and you get it, it’s going to resonate with you forever.”

Massey was assigned to an “all age” knowledge school for students who weren’t going to university and would learn a vocation, likely in hospitality given Jamaica’s tourism industry. Her job was to write grant applications and raise money for a canteen. At the time, she explained, the government subsidized inexpensive ingredients like flour, sugar and chicken backs to make food for the students.

“The theory is that if the children are fed, they will learn better, and it’s also motivation for the parents to send their kids to school knowing they will get two meals a day,” Massey said. “The school wanted a proper area to prepare food.”

She also used her baking skills for income-generating projects with the kids, making brownies and other food they could sell. And the school’s principal sent a very intimidated Massey out to local businesses to ask for donations.

“I didn’t think they’d listen to me or pay any attention to me. But I was really amazed by the generosity of the people,” she said.

When Massey returned to Coronado, she was at loose ends and took a temporary holiday job at In Good Taste. It would be a gig that changed her life’s trajectory.

“That’s where I was working with my partners, Jenny and Mary Ann, and we started talking and kind of scheming about opening a restaurant.”

In 2001, they opened Tartine not long after 9/11.

“My idea with this was that it was like a European cafe, like ones in Paris where you could come at any time of day and meet with your friends for a meal or just a cup of coffee or a dessert or a glass of wine,” Massey said. “The intention was always that this was going to be a gathering place. And then the world just sort of created a situation where it needed a gathering place and here we were.”

“Barbara was a really valuable asset from the start given her knowledge of the pastry world,” Berta said. “During her time at In Good Taste, she started to understand more about running a business.”

Berta explained that each of the partners has her own role in the business. She’s the company’s secretary and is engaged in customer interaction and, according to Massey, is the face of the team. As chief financial officer, Freel handles the finances. Massey is the CEO, running the kitchen and operations.

“Barbara’s grown into a savvy business owner,” Berta said. “She trains and she manages the kitchen and the team seamlessly. She’s always bringing in top talent who are passionate and dedicated to Tartine. And she’s so thoughtful, and basically balanced about how and when to expand our operation and to meet customer demand while never compromising the team or our resources.

“Jenny and I know how lucky we are to have a partner like Barbara.”

One of the people Massey hired is chef de cuisine Billy Gilcrest, who has been with Tartine for 16 years. His wife, Elodie, is Massey’s morning baker. He believes Massey is perfect for what Tartine needs.

“She’s very sweet and loving, but she also has to be strict and make sure people are accountable,” he said. “When you walk in here and see the pastry displays, everything is identical and pretty. That takes consistency. She gets that because she runs a tight ship and enables the people who work for her to work as a team and make things better. She listens to her crew, and it’s made the restaurant a lot more successful.”

One benefit of having a tight crew is that Massey is now able to step back a little. That extra time has allowed her to indulge in her other great passion: horseback riding.

“I’ve always loved horses, and I rode when I was little,” Massey said. “When I go on vacation, I would always try to fit in horseback riding if it was offered. Our family would go up to a ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley on a regular basis, and I’d go on trail rides there. Every time I’d come back and say, ‘I need to figure out how to do this in San Diego.’”

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic began, a former employee put Massey in touch with her son’s riding teacher.

“It worked out perfectly because you could ride through the pandemic since it was outside,” Massey said. “Because work was so intense, I could go off and be outside and ride. And the more I got into it, the more I realized that I wanted to learn how to jump. My instructor said, ‘If you want to learn how to jump, you need to buy a well-trained jumping horse.’ And so I did and that’s how I spend almost all my spare time.”

Last September, Massey bought a 17-year-old former jumping champion, a 17-hand Dutch Warmblood named Amigo. She boards and rides him in the South Bay, which allows her quick access so she can spend more time with him.

“My beautiful boy,” she said, gazing at a photo of Amigo. “He’s so handsome. It was something I had wanted to do for a very long time, and I just didn’t really have the resources, the time or the means. And then the opportunity presented itself and I said, ‘Why not?’”

“The life I’ve had has afforded me to do a lot of different things,” she said. “Tartine is successful from a business and financial point, but it’s also successful in what I really wanted it to be — a gathering place that makes people happy. I think we put out a good product. We employ a bunch of people and that’s what makes me happy.” ■