Name: Michele McCurdy-Buonacorsi
Job: Real estate agent and author of Joseph's Storehouse Baking Company: From My Heart to Yours
Age: 65
Birthplace: San Antonio
Industry Experience: McCurdy-Buonacorsi began as a home baker and eventually developed the recipes behind beloved local restaurant Joseph's Storehouse Baking Company.
Until its 2013 closure, Joseph's Storehouse Baking Company provided San Antonians with soulful home-cooked sustenance. Tucked into a strip center near Brackenridge Park, the restaurant and bakery became a go-to for meatloaf, buttery yeast rolls and sweets such as carrot cake and fudgy chocolate cupcakes.
Michele McCurdy-Buonacorsi, the mind behind the food that kept fans returning to Joseph's, recently compiled those recipes and others into a 475-page cookbook she calls a scrapbook of 40 years in the kitchen.
We sat down with her to chat about the evolution of the restaurant and how her food has touched generations.
The introduction of your book says the food life found you. Was your intent always to build a restaurant?
My ex-husband was a pastor, and we, in 1987, decided to leave the mainline denomination and start a little Christian fellowship. It was a small congregation, since there were times — I mean, months — when we didn't get paid. And it got really serious. I'd always been a stay-at-home mom, I had four kids at the time, and I loved to bake. I heard about this lady in Alamo Heights that was buying organic wheat from Montana. It would come in these big 50-gallon buckets, and she would mill it into fresh flour and make this awesome homemade whole-wheat bread out of it.
So, I called her and asked her if she would teach me how to make it. She agreed, and I eventually started milling my own wheat, and gave [the bread] to my friends, who were saying, "Michele, this bread is so good. You need to sell it." I had never planned on selling the bread, but things got pretty dire, and Christmas was coming. At first, all I could think was, "Oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing. How humiliating." But that day, I made my first $100. Over the following months, people were ordering bread and asking me to cater lunches, so I ended up renting commercial kitchen space to keep up with the demand. We finally landed on the North St. Mary's Street building.
And from there, it grew into more than bread? This cookbook is huge, so the menu had to have been extensive.
I was never trained as a chef, I have no formal culinary training, so people would come in and ask me, "Do you make this? Do you make that?" And I would just answer, "Sure, I make that," and then I'd go dig around, do some research and make a lot of mistakes ... throw a lot of food away, unfortunately. But within three months, the place was packed. There was a line around the door. It never occurred to us that right across the street was an office building and a bank. It was perfect because people would walk in from across the street, have us cater their lunches. Then I noticed I was starting to get really tired, which, you know, why wouldn't I be? But I found out I was pregnant again.
So, this is baby number five, three months into the opening?
Yes, those days it was like trying to stay on a wild bull. I'd get up at two in the morning, get the two little ones up, the new baby and my four-year-old, and bring them with me too. I had a little closet that I made into a little baby area, with places for them to sleep. I'd get all the baked goods done by six in the morning, then would rush home to get the older kids up, get them to school, rush back to the restaurant and have it ready for lunch by 11. Lunch would last until 2 in the afternoon, before you ever even caught your breath. Then you try to grab a bite to eat and have to start on payroll and all the book work. We opened in 1993, and I did that until 2002. And in my divorce, he was awarded the restaurant. And it broke my heart because I'd done a lot. That was my vision, it was my baby. They were all my recipes. But I had to walk away from there, and I never was able to go back. After he sold the restaurant, I think in 2014, I told him I was going to write a cookbook.
What does it mean to you to leave a legacy that's so close to your heart?
I self-published it with the intention of only doing 25 copies, planning to just give away 14 of them to our kids. I had like 10 books left and then I got COVID during the first two weeks of January. And I had had an awful lot of cough medicine and I was feeling it, and so I thought, "You know, I'm just gonna post something on Facebook and say, 'Hey, anybody remember Joseph's? Well, I'm Michele McCurdy, I just published a cookbook, and it's got most all of Joseph's recipes in it.'" I've had message after message of people saying, "Oh, my God, Joseph's meant so much to me. I remember we took our kids there every week." Or, "We were there all the time." And I realized that ... in trying to leave a legacy for my kids, I left a legacy for the people of San Antonio as well. I have been so touched it makes me want to cry.
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