Sweets from the Underground
A visit to Gregory’s Gourmet Desserts
Story and photos by Anna Mindess
Artist Richard Choi painted this mural of Gregory Williams as a child with his mother and grandmother for the wall outside Gregory’s underground kitchen.
It might be Oakland’s most deeply loved bakery, but it’s been tucked away in an underground space on an unlikely street for 25 years. The shop at 285 23rd Street is so small that only one, maybe two people can enter at a time to pick out their portions of cheesecake or cobbler.
When Gregory Williams moved into this cozy spot in 1999, the brick building was surrounded by open parking lots. Now this Uptown street is lined with modern apartment buildings and offices.
Originally from Brooklyn, Williams came to San Francisco with his family in his teens. He finished school and started work but wasn’t yet thinking about baking.
The calling took some time to take hold, but Williams recalls a particular day in 1987 when he had a job interview in Oakland. “I remember taking BART and walking down Grand Avenue,” he says. “I stood in front of this very building, and had the weirdest sensation…‘Why does this building seem familiar to me?’” It would be a decade before he found out.
Williams pegs his start in baking to a selfish obsession with the apple streusel cheesecake from La Petite Boulangerie. When the chain bakery suddenly stopped making it, he complained to a friend, who gave him a springform pan and a cookbook and said, “Make it yourself!” He did. Then people wanted to buy the cakes.
Before Williams made baking his full-time career, he held a series of jobs including one as a deckhand for a tugboat company. Sometime later he got hired as an apartment manager, and he found that the kitchens of the empty apartments were quite useful for his cheesecake-baking side hustle. When he got his first big order—26 cakes for a major hotel—he had to run between the apartments and up and down stairs to get all the cakes baked and delivered on time. The hotel loved his cheesecakes and wanted 26 more the next day.
Gregory’s Key Lime Pie (Photo by Anna Mindess)
In 1999, the owners of that apartment building said, “Greg, we know that you are baking in the building. We want you to look at something.” They gave him an address. It was the same building he had noticed in 1987.
Once established in the building’s basement kitchen, Williams continued baking for hotels and restaurants, sometimes working 16 or 18 hours a day. Passersby couldn’t help but notice the enticing aromas wafting out to the street, so Williams started opening for “Cookie Wednesdays” from 10 to 2 to appease the interest. As word spread, he added Fridays, then Thursdays, then Tuesdays and Saturdays…until he was open six days a week.
“It’s taken this long and so much patience,” he says. “Having this bakery humbled me so much. Working down here, out of the view of everyone. I’ve grown spiritually in this place more than anything. Now that my name has gone viral in the whole social media thing, I don’t take it for granted. I don’t get too high or too low. I’ve learned to just ride the waves.”
Williams gradually added more items like Key lime pie, sweet potato pie, peach and blackberry cobblers, and chocolate chip cookies to his cheesecake production line.
“Everyone thinks I’m from the South because I make these peach cobblers, but my family is from Panama. My mom and grandma didn’t make pies or cakes. I grew up on coconut rice, peas, and plantains. I never had peach cobbler or sweet potato pie till I moved out to California. When I tell people that,” Williams chuckles, “they say, ‘Then there must be an old Southern woman working in the back.’”
He is planning to open another bakery in San Ramon in the coming months. ♦
Anna Mindess is an award-winning journalist who writes on food, culture, and travel for numerous publications including the Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Berkeleyside. Follow her on Instagram @annamindess and find her stories at annamindess.contently.com.
