Like the lyrics from the Frank Sinatra song, “I did it my way,” Charlie Tola does it his way in his retail bakery, Lulu’s Bakery, in the Fresh Meadows neighborhood of Queens, near St. John’s University. Like bakers of a previous generation, Tola is completely self-taught, having grown up working in his uncle’s bakery. In his early 20s, he worked in a bakery café, and he knew that he wanted to own his own bakery. He just needed to find a location.

His now-wife’s family had recently moved into the Fresh Meadows neighborhood and had to travel four miles to the nearest retail bakery to buy pastries. Tola found a storefront for rent in the area along a major thoroughfare, which offered a lot of visibility, and he knew it was the right location. “I was scared. I opened the bakery when I was 23,” he says. “I’m still scared, but I think I made the right move at the right time. If I’d had a family, I wouldn’t have made it. I was able to establish myself first.”

A staff of six bakers makes almost all of the bakery’s products from scratch using only quality ingredients.

He and his father, who worked in the construction industry, remodeled the interior of the building. To this day, Tola does annual tweaks to the interior, painting the walls or doing some minor rearranging.

The bakery opened its doors in January 1999. “We actually had the store ready in the middle of December, and my dad wanted us to open right away,” Tola says. “But I knew that people would have high expectations for their Christmas pastries, and if I disappointed them, they wouldn’t come back. So I decided to wait until after the holidays when there was less pressure.”

The decision proved beneficial as Tola and the neighborhood had to find a compromise on the bakery’s product line. The first indication that he might be facing a tough crowd came before the bakery even opened its doors. Tola had installed a large “Bakery” sign on the building’s roof, and early one morning, he heard a knock on the door. It was a man from the neighborhood. He pointed to the sign, and said, “You need us; we don’t need you.”

“That’s all he had to say,” Tola laughs. “I took that sign down.” He replaced it with a less obtrusive sign for Lulu’s Italian American Bakery.

His dream of running an Italian-American bakery also took a hit after he opened his doors. “Italian baking is my real passion, but the cannolis wouldn’t sell, so I had to figure out what sells. It was hard,” he says. It took him about two years to develop a product line that fit his baking expertise and was what the neighborhood wanted. The cannolis ended up staying. “Now the customers trust me. They see something new and they want it,” Tola adds.

Diverse product line

The product line includes a variety of cakes­–strawberry shortcake, chocolate mousse, Italian cheesecake, New York-style cheesecake–pastries, such as sfogliatelle, fruit tarts, napoleons, bread pudding and the namesake Lulu, as well a variety of cookies like butter cookies, biscotti and black and whites. Breakfast items include croissants, a variety of Danish, muffins and brioche. Lulu’s offers a variety of breads; however, Tola does not make them in-house. Instead, he buys them from two area bread bakeries.

“We don’t sell a lot of bread, but I felt I needed it to fill out the product line,” he says. Customers are aware that it is not made by Lulu’s.

It took about two years to find the perfect mix of Italian specialties and American favorites at Lulu’s Bakery.

Most products are available on a daily basis, but Lulu’s does offer a variety of seasonal items, some of which have evolved into daily items. The torta Americana was created for the Fourth of July, and has become a year-round seller. It’s based off the three colors of the American flag–red is strawberry, blue is blueberries and the white is represented by both banana cream and vanilla cake. The torte features a vanilla cake base made with strawberry juice and filled with banana mousse with fresh blueberries. The torte is then coated with a strawberry glaze.

New products also sometimes come from a place of desperation. During the Easter holiday five years ago, Tola sold out of product more quickly than expected, leaving an empty space in the showcase that he needed to fill. He had chocolate sponge on the worktable, and he quickly began grabbing everything he could find that was chocolate, like chocolate chips, chocolate mousse, etc., and he created the Seven C’s. Each “c” stands for a different chocolate component, and customers loved it. “I just used what I had available, and now I can’t discontinue it. They love chocolate.”

The torta bacio is another Tola original that has taken off. “You won’t find it in an Italian cookbook because I made it up,” he says. The torte is composed of a chocolate cake base soaked in rum with chopped hazelnuts and chocolate chips and is covered with ganache.

Charlie Tola knew from the time he was a child that he wanted to own his own bakery, and he made that dream happen when he was only 23.

Lulu’s also does a decent business in the very un-Italian cupcake. “What’s big right now is my jumbo cupcake,” Tola says. “They taste good and they are different.” The cake-size cupcakes took off when he was interviewed by a television station at a food festival and he had one sitting next to him.

“We sell so many of them, I had to buy more moulds,” he adds. The jumbo cupcakes are offered in the usual varieties, which include red velvet, chocolate chip and parfait. He also decorates them for holidays. This past Easter, he made chicks, bunnies and flowers.

Other new products include macarons, raspberry almond cookies and lemon chocolate cheesecake. “The traditional products, they don’t get tired of. Other items, they get tired of and sales start dropping,” Tola says. “When I see sales start dropping, it’s time to get something new in there.”

Products can be found in the same place in each showcase every day, with the less expensive items in the front and more expensive, colorful items in the back to gradually draw customers into the store. “We try to keep the color at the ends because that’s where your eye goes,” he says.