For half a century Rachel’s Restaurant and Bakery has been a beloved dining institution in Ocean Beach and Fire Island. On the summer of this milestone occasion we sat down with the woman behind the cookies, Rachel Doering herself, as well as her son , Joe and daughter-in-law Angela to explore the genesis of this family-owned etablishment.
Fire Island News (FIN): Let’s start with the early years. It is 1975, and you’ve decided to open up a bake shop on Fire Island. How did that come about?
Rachel Doering: Mike the Greek. My daughter Pam was Mike’s mother’s helper. He asked if I would be willing to work as a cashier on weekends. I said, ‘sure.’ At the end of the season, he offered me the small side store that was available. If I had any sense, I would have said no. But I said yes. So, my mother and I took the store. I had no idea what to sell. My mother belonged to the Altar Society of an Italian church, and she suggested hot puffs filled with fruit. She said the Altar Society did well selling them, and that’s how we started.
FIN: So, you started selling hot puffs and chocolate chip cookies, then you slowly grew and expanded into a fuller bakery? You didn’t start serving breakfast and dinner right away?
Rachel Doering: That took ten years. I was teaching the whole time. I was an elementary school teacher for 21 years. Initially, I didn’t know how to bake. I was using cake mixes, but then I started taking night courses at BOCES. I taught children during the day and learned how to bake at night until everything here was baked from scratch. Then I opened other places. I had a bake shop in Cherry Grove, then another in Hunter, New York, and a third in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I even had a stint in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Then there was Hicksville. We can’t forget Hicksville.
Angela Doering: That’s where we met. In 1979, I was a senior in high school, and I worked at her Hicksville restaurant. She wasn’t even barely open when I came in and interviewed, and she hired me.
Rachel Doering: I called my daughter that day and told her that I had met my future daughter-in-law.
Angela Doering: Joe and I met later on. Rachel and I worked together for a long time, and both my sisters also started working there. My family also comes from baking. My dad worked in bakeries all his life. He had owned a bakery when he moved from Italy.
FIN: We can’t conduct this interview without discussing the famous cookie case. That puts you on the map, Rachel.
Rachel Doering: And it’s a story worth telling.
FIN: You broke the barrier. There was no eating on Ocean Beach walks until you took it to court.
Rachel Doering: I took it to court. It went to the New York State Supreme Court. So, I found two kids who were willing to be arrested. They got handcuffed and brought to jail.
FIN: It was a setup? You arranged for those guys to get arrested so that you could fight the case?
Rachel Doering: Well, they kept a cop outside my door. He would wait there. Next door, there was the ice cream store, and they were left alone. [The police] said, ‘Ice cream is an American tradition.’ So, I said, ‘Well, I bake apple pie, and I’m a mother.’
FIN: What year are we talking about?
Angela Doering: It was May 27th, 1977.
Rachel Doering: We sold “cookie case” t-shirts and made The New York Times.
FIN: I remember you used to have a display in your old restaurant, with the newspaper clippings blown up and framed on the wall. You made national headlines. Television crews from Japan and Israel came to fill that small courtroom. I don’t think poor Judge Mehlman was quite sure what to do. You were a fierce woman!
Joe Doering: She still is.
Rachel Doering: The powers that be gave me a hard time.
FIN: Another big moment for you guys, in some ways like the cookie case, was the rebuild, when the old Peterson structure was torn down to make way for the new structure in which we are sitting now.
Joe Doering: We had to do something. The building needed repair, and it didn’t make much sense to sink money into trying to repair a building that was falling apart.
FIN: Hurricane Sandy devastated everything.
Joe Doering: Right! We made repairs after Sandy, but the floors underneath were rotting. Lifting that building was not possible. It was an old building.
FIN: I think it was about a hundred years old.
Joe Doering: I know that some people weren’t happy about it, but things turned out well because of it.
FIN: This one has been up for quite some time now
Angela Doering: Seven years.
FIN: Let’s talk about the food, because at the end of the day, it’s about the food. Let’s talk about the genesis of your menu over the years.
Joe Doering: Angela and I were involved in operating the restaurant in the 1980s, but then we started our place in Syosset in the 1990s.
FIN: Was your place in Syosset also called Rachel’s?
Joe Doering: Yes, it was a lunch and dinner place. It was Italian, eclectic Italian. We also made pizza. We made our pasta. Some of the dishes we’re serving now at dinner started over there. We came back a few years before the knockdown.
FIN: Yeah. I vaguely recall when your influence on the menu began, which was a few years before the knockdown. I’m thinking 2016 or 2017. Right?
Joe Doering: Probably. We brought the recipes for many dishes we used to serve in Syosset with us.
FIN: I don’t know of any Fire Island restaurant that serves squash flowers except you guys.
Angela Doering: My mom grows those zucchini flowers! The salmon is from our old restaurant; that dish, that recipe. So is the halibut dish. In the fall, when we change the menu, we have the acorn squash. People can’t wait until we do that.
FIN: Then, of course, there is the desert. When I first started coming out here, my favorite thing you made was the chocolate sheet cake with frosting.
Angela and Rachel Doering together: Black magic!
FIN: These days, my favorite is probably your pignoli nut cookie and the gelato. There are not many places on Fire Island that serve gelato either.
Joe Doering: We figured it would be a nice addition to the bakery.
FIN: (To Joe) Sometimes I still see your mother baking.
Joe Doering: She’s not ready to retire!
FIN: Rachel, you’ve been quite the entrepreneur over these years, haven’t you?
Rachel Doering: It was just fun. It was just fun. That’s all. Fifty years ago, everything was different.
