Michael Baker opened Baker's Best in 1984 and now has 100 employees at two locations.
(Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)
G FORCE | MICHAEL BAKER
A Best taste scenario
Michael Baker opened Baker's Best in 1984 and now has 100 employees at two locations.
(Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)
Michael Baker opened the take-out shop Baker's Best in 1984. It began as a tiny storefront in Newton Highlands that Baker, a lifelong Newton resident, built into a $1 million-a-year business. Then he moved across the street to a larger space, opened a commissary in Needham for corporate and other catering, and now brings in $12 million a year. He employs 100 full-time cooks and retail workers. Baker lives with his fiancee, Deena Berg, a preschool teacher. We checked in with him to see what people are ordering during graduation and wedding season.
Q. Your shop is always mobbed. What are customers buying?
A. We have these mesclun salads with sun-dried cranberries and balsalmic vinegar and chevre; Mexican salad with fresh grilled corn and spicy Mexican dressing, little tortilla chips that are handmade; Cobb salad with all-natural chicken and great bacon. We have seven or eight premade salads. We sell a tremendous amount of salmon salad. [The cooks] take salmon and grill it, break it apart, serve it with green beans and tomatoes. Just interesting combinations. Another is corn, avocado, and cucumber salad.
Q. How do you prepare your famous chicken salad with red grapes?
A. That's something a lot of people know us for. We're getting a natural boneless chicken breast [and] steaming the chicken. To do it right is in everyone's best interest. We're tasting all the time. There are people who go around and do nothing but taste. [The salad] has small diced red onion, mayonnaise, and red wine vinegar. A lot of people don't want heavily mayonnaise salad. Red wine cuts the mayonnaise. A little salt and pepper.
Q. What do you do to make an ordinary dish stand out?
A. For years, people wanted to create something different, something newfangled. Now, line a platter with field greens, add a bundle of grapes, a fresh flower from the garden. If someone has grilled chicken, add a homemade dipping sauce. You can buy an interesting sauce to make the basic chicken seem a little nicer. My mother makes a great noodle kugel. We always send it [to a customer] with a handwritten recipe on a card to make it nicer.
Q. What do you do about the growing number of food allergies?
A. If someone is gluten-free, we make up specific items. Everything is made to order, so it's not as though we can't deal with that.
Q. I got some takeout at your shop recently and it passed two tests: It was so well wrapped that it didn't leak all over my car and it was well seasoned.
A. Three months ago I brought home chicken piccata. It ended up getting all over my trunk. I washed it out and it continued to smell. One Sunday in the spring I opened up the trunk and - you know where the tire is at the bottom? - there was piccata sauce. But I had wrapped it. It was my fault!
Q. When your fiancee needs to bring a dish somewhere, does she come into the shop and pick what she wants?
A. I think that's why she's marrying me.
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