The one and only Katalina Riegelmann. Lucy Gellman Photo.
It was just past 10 a.m. off Whitney Avenue, and the scents of chocolate, coffee, butter and spun sugar hung heavy in the air. Across a counter heavy with sweets, nothing seemed out of the ordinary: cupcakes sat in orderly rows, covered in neat, undulating ribbons of frosting. Thin, bright layers of pumpkin and apple slipped between homemade pastry crust and a crackly wash of glaze. Raspberry bars the color of precious stones and melty wedding cookies dusted with powdered sugar waited for the morning’s customers.
In less than a month, it will be all gone. And baker Katalina Riegelmann is remembering the sweet company she’s built over more than a decade in business.
That news, delivered amidst trays of berry-studded scones, coconut-kissed magic bars and candy-colored rows of frosted cupcakes, arrived at 74 Whitney Ave. late last month, as Riegelmann announced that she will be closing her beloved shop, Katalina’s Bakery, permanently on October 21. The day marks a decade and a half since she first soft opened to the public in 2011.
After 15 years on Whitney Avenue, she is preparing to say goodbye to thousands of customers who have turned to her for a treat, and found a second home, a favorite study spot, and a sense of New Haven family that they didn’t know they needed. As she closes up shop, she said, she has only gratitude for the community, and the generosity she has witnessed in times of financial scarcity where people still show up.
“It’s very bittersweet,” she said as employee Maya Tindell helped out a customer behind the counter. “I did it. No one thought I could do it. I just want to say, ‘Thank you, New Haven.’”
The closure, which Riegelmann first announced on social media in September, is the end of an era she can measure in pounds of whipped, golden and gem-toned buttercream, countless cups of Stumptown coffee, tens of thousands of cupcakes, and Hungarian desserts like zserbo and biegli that a person won’t find anywhere else in the city.
During her time as a small business owner, she has given hundreds of kids their first (and second, and third) baking lessons, whipped up wedding cakes on commission, helped feed hospital workers during a global pandemic, and made hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students and transplants fall in love with New Haven, one bite, dance fundraiser, and baking session at a time.
What makes the space so loveable, perhaps, is her ability to create and sustain community through food, and the conversations it inevitably fosters. For years, she turned out monthly specials, sometimes holding contests to dream up new creations like the the sweet-and-savory “New Haven,” complete with a spicy tomato and nutmeg base, or the “Boola Boola Brownie,” in which notes of coffee and hazelnut made it into the confection.
“She understands that a coffee [and cupcake] shop has a broader mission than just selling you food,” said Lee Cruz, director of strategic partnerships at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. For years, Cruz has loved to schedule meetings at Katalina’s, because it feels quiet and spacious, and yet private enough at the same time. “What [Possible Futures Founder] Lauren Anderson is to independent bookstores, Kathy is for baking.”
“And,” he added of a meeting he’d had just hours before, “It’s hard not to find something you like.”
In many ways, that lives within Riegelmann herself. The child of Hungarian immigrants born in New Haven and raised in Bethany, Riegelmann has never particularly liked hearing the word “no”—and has often used it as fuel to defy expectations and forge a path ahead. Growing up, she remembered, no one in her house was particularly interested in baking, so much so that for years, she thought she would be an educator.
After attending Amity High School as a teen, she started classes at Southern Connecticut State University, which allowed her to stay close to home. Even then, she was already intimately familiar with the Whitney-Audubon corridor where she would one day own her shop: she frequented shows at the old Foundry Café, then a hotspot for jazz (she can still remember watching the late Rohn Lawrence play with his band, Good News).
This was the 1980s, before the idea of baking had ever entered her mind. In her classes at SCSU, a professor told her that she didn’t have it in her to be an educator, which gave Riegelmann the fuel to prove her wrong. When her then-boyfriend made the transition from New Haven to Massachusetts, she followed him to Boston and began her studies at Wheelock College (now the Wheelock College of Education & Human Development at Boston University), where she was for the next five years.
During that time, she also began teaching as a fitness instructor, balancing long hours of schoolwork with a commitment to building strength that has remained with her for nearly four decades (“I can still pick up 50 pounds of sugar and not need help,” she said with a smile during an interview that ended in moist, cinnamony and generously frosted squares of pumpkin bread neatly packed into a brown box).
When Riegelmann finished at Wheelock in the early 1990s, she thought that she would become an elementary school teacher. It was a time, certainly, when New Haven was still very much a hub of educational experimentation: there were spots like High School in the Community, a teacher-led “school without walls,” and a still-evolving Educational Center for the Arts, which had at that point only been on Audubon Street for about a decade.
Maya Tindell and Katalina Riegelmann.
But when she learned about a chance to breathe new life into the first floor of the Foundry building, which by then had closed its music-making doors, it felt like fate. With Candace Blasi, Riegelmann became the founding co-owner of Koffee?, which occupies that building, around 1993. It was her work in the space that necessitated learning how to bake, she said. Every morning, she would rise early, and turn out a slate of new pastries for the first customers of the day.
“I think everything I enjoyed baking because it was all new to me,” she said in a follow-up text. “I was constantly making new things.”
When Blasi and Riegelmann sold Koffee? to new owners in the late 1990s, Blasi moved to Louisiana, and Riegelmann doubled down on teaching fitness classes, including at the Payne-Whitney Gym at Yale. During her time running a small business, she had also welcomed her son, Zachary, and dedicated herself to both being his mom and building a career.
Then around 2008, “the cupcake craze went crazy,” she remembered, a trend to which she credits the television show Sex and the City. By then, she was baking cupcakes, although not on a huge scale, and dreaming about a shop that would let her expand her business. New Haven, a city that a person can criss-cross in under half an hour, already had a cupcake truck, which meant that the likelihood of another sweet spot was not high.
And then, according to a 2011 article from a then-nascent New Haven Independent, she found a backer who was excited about the idea. On October 21 of that year, she opened her doors to the community. She’s been churning out confections ever since.
“My favorite part is the customers,” she said. “We created a community.”
And she has. Through her work at Katalina’s, Riegelmann has been able to launch an economic driver in a quirky corridor that includes small food businesses, several arts nonprofits and two high schools within a half-mile radius. She’s also taught thousands of New Haveners how to bake, from her after-school programs at the Foote School to the cookie decorating classes, flour-dusted birthday parties and lessons for the confection-curious of all ages.
She’s started mentorship programs through her work as a fitness instructor, including for young women in high school who may share the same immigrant family background that she did. She’s gotten a few celebrity visits, including from former President Bill Clinton in 2014. And she’s experimented with opening up her kitchen as an incubator, including to culinary artists like Mubarakah Ibrahim, who ran a bean pie business for a few years, and was ultimately instrumental in getting cottage food license legislation passed in the city.
That doesn’t mean it’s been easy, she said. On a normal day, Riegelmann wakes up at midnight to be in the shop by 1 a.m., sometimes sooner (last Thursday, she was there by 12:15 a.m.). In those quiet, small hours of the morning, she bakes dozens of scones, pop tarts, whoopie pies, gluten free and paleo treats, and cupcakes, with flavors that range from red velvet to double-vanilla, to be topped with a neat cap of vanilla buttercream before the night is over.
Around 5 a.m., she comes home to walk her dog, a three-year-old pit rescue named Lucy. By 6 a.m., she’s in the gym for an hour, then back at the shop to frost cupcakes and arrange baked goods behind the counter just so, in the same neat and regimented way she has for years. At 9 a.m., she opens like clockwork. By mid-morning, she’s left to teach pilates or spin, and the shop remains in the hands of one of her two employees for the rest of the day.
She’s in bed by 5 in the afternoon. Then her alarm goes off at midnight, and she does it all again.
In over a decade, she said, the exhaustion alone hasn’t been the thing to get to her: the schedule works because it’s such a familiar and well-worn routine (even when she’s visiting family in Hungary, she finds that it works across the time difference). But the reality of running a small, woman-owned food business is hard—and has finally started to catch up with her.
After surviving the Covid-19 pandemic (“my community just showed up,” she remembered), Riegelmann could see how differently people interacted with food, and with each other. But the community kept showing up, and she kept baking. When Yale welcomed students back to campus in fall 2020, catering contracts that popped up gave her a steady and more reliable stream of income, she said.
Then last fall, she said, she lost a contract with Yale Catering that had brought her sweets into the Yale School of Management, and helped her make monthly rent. At the time, the Trump Administration had passed legislation that raised the endowment tax on universities to eight percent. Before the change, it had been less than two percent—meaning that the university began cutting costs to keep up.
Already, Riegelmann was feeling the economic weight of tariffs, on everything from basic ingredients to increasingly-hard-to-afford items like coffee and cocoa. On her early-morning visits to restaurant depot, she would run into other restaurant and bakery owners experiencing the same thing. “A lot of people are hurting as well,” she said.
The costs to stay open kept mounting. And at some point, they stopped making sense.
While the decision was and is bittersweet, Riegelmann said, she’s made her peace with it—and remains grateful to Yale Properties for all the company has done as a landlord (during the first months of Covid-19, Yale Properties provided Riegelmann with rent relief that allowed her to stay afloat). A final goodbye party, complete with dancing and cookie decoration, will take place on October 17 at 3 p.m.
Her door will close for a final time on October 21, which is a Wednesday, at 5 p.m.
While she plans to continue baking on a much smaller scale, she doesn’t see owning a brick-and-mortar space again. Instead, she plans to become a pilates reformer instructor, for which she recently landed a fellowship, and work more closely with menopausal and post-menopausal women over 50 at Strength Haven. Riegelmann herself is 64; she’s already considering a trip to Hungary for her 65th birthday next year.
“Women our age don’t want some 20-year-old who is 115 pounds!” she said with a smile.
On a recent Thursday morning, the shop was quiet, save for an occasional tinkling of a bell that tipped a person off to a new customer. Through the street-facing windows, sunshine streamed in, making the orange and blue decals in the window glow. A single patron sat at a table close to the far side of the room, concentrating on a sweet treat that her fork was already halfway buried in. At one point, she looked up at Riegelmann and smiled, as if to convey her gratitude.
Tindell, who met Riegelmann years ago when she had her sixth birthday at the shop, said it will be hard to see her mentor move on—but that she’s seen how exhausting Riegelmann’s workload, which she often shoulders alone, can be. From the moment the two were in each other’s lives, they hit it off: Tindell started volunteering at the shop when she was 13, and working there formally three years later.
A graduate of Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS) and New Haven Academy, she’s currently on a break from college, and used it to sharpen her culinary skills. Because Riegelmann “is like a second mom to me,” it feels like a home away from home. Thursday found her turning out two dainty chocolate cakes, each with a perfect, crackly dome that caught in the light, for her dad’s birthday.
That’s part of the magic of working in a bakery: she’s able to skill-build in between helping with the day’s baked goods and customers.
“I think it’s sad! But I think Kathy needs a break too,” Tindell said as she inspected the cakes, letting them cool on the counter. “It’s sad to me because I’m at the age where everything around me is changing,” and the shop has been a constant.
She’s one of many mourning the end of this delectable chapter. Zahara Gazzola, a sophomore at Wilbur Cross High School and ACES Educational Center for the Arts (who has also written for the Arts Paper), pointed to how she’s grieving the closure before it happens, as are many of her friends. Or in her words, "devastating and heartbreaking.”
As a kid, she met Riegelmann through baking classes at The Foote School, offered as an after-school program. Long after moving on, she remained close with Riegelmann, who greets her as “my old friend” and checks in on her schoolwork. Beyond the conversation, Gazzola will miss the whoopie pies—soft chocolate sandwich cookies with whipped cream in the middle—and the red velvet cupcakes.
“It's kind of insane, because it's been there for like, forever,” Gazzola said in a phone call Thursday afternoon. “It's been there almost as long as I've been alive.”
“She [Riegelmann] knows everybody,” she added. “Every time I come in … She'll check in and ask how school is going and what my homework is like. and she makes sure all of her employees do that too. She's worked really hard to build that.”