Get Your Paczki Order In Or Prepare For A Not-So-Fat Tuesday

CHICAGO — While I wasn’t paying attention, my corner of the far South Side had become a paczki desert.

Long after Wisconsin Steel closed up shop and the surrounding business in South Deering silently disappeared, folks living in my part of town could still count on the glass case at Calumet Bakery to be packed with pillowy soft Polish doughnuts packed with custard, fruit and cheese, and lightly dusted with powdered sugar.

Despite assurances from Google and Calumet Bakery’s own website that my only local paczki purveyor on a one-way residential stretch of 106th Street was still serving up the good stuff, a voice on the Calumet Bakery answering machine said the Southeast Side bakery was indefinitely closed. An employee at Calumet Bakery in suburban Lansing confirmed the bad news.

“Yeah, that location has been closed since sometime last year,” the woman said.

MORE ON PATCH: Calumet Bakery Crew Worked 24-Hour Shifts to Make 42,000 Paczki

The news ruined my pre-Lent plans to visit the work home of baker Luis Rojas, whom everybody calls “Duck,” where last year his crew worked 24-hour shifts to shape, fry, slice and stuffed more than 42,000 traditional Polish treats to satisfy the ravenous appetites of locals and Calumet Bakery loyalists.

It was late morning Friday when I set out in search of a replacement paczki haven with stocked shelves on the South Side.

I made it Bridgeport Bakery 2.0, a modern reboot of a longtime Polish purveyor of sweet treats on Archer Avenue, just in time to overhear Mark Kstillos order the last three paczki in stock.

His trio of paczki — pronounced punch-kee — were stuffed with Bavarian cream.

“This is place is great. It’s my first time back in a long time,” he said. “I feel lucky.”

I felt jealous. So I headed west on Archer toward the Garfield Ridge and Archer Heights neighborhoods, where a few Polish bakeries have survived among an abundance of taco shops and panaderias.

Around noon, Racine Bakery at 6216 S. Archer still had a spattering of paczki for sale. I ordered $1.99 doughy delights stuffed with sweet apricot, raspberry, custard — and strawberries atop fresh whipped cream for $2.49 each.

I chatted with a Polish lady from the neighborhood waiting at the counter. When I asked which paczki were her favorite, she looked around to see if anyone was listening and shook her head.

“Not here,” she whispered, so not to be rude. “I come here for my mother. She likes their prune and apricot paczkis. I get mine at Webber. Better. And they’re cheaper. $1.39. ... Pticek, too. I like that place.”

I took her advice and headed to Webber Bakery at 7055 S. Archer, a neighborhood staple since 1930.

When I arrived, the parking lot was packed and, much to my chagrin, the paczki shelves for walk-up customers were bare.

I wasn’t surprised. It’s well known that early birds — and folks smart enough to order in advance — get the paczki, particularly in the days preceding Paczki Day, the last day before Lent also known as Fat Tuesday.

Still, I rushed to Pticek & Son Bakery in Garfield Ridge, hoping for a paczki miracle.

When I got there, the college journalism student working behind the counter at 5523 S. Narragansett Ave. was busy breaking terrible news to a customer on the phone.

“Sorry,” Emma Gomez said in a kind voice. “I can’t take any more paczki orders for Tuesday.”

That has been the state of Paczki Day inventory at Pticek & Son since Tuesday, eight full days before the Polish pastry’s namesake holiday.

“We get a lot of calls, and I have to say I’m sorry but it’s too late. Most people are nice, but some get mad,” Gomez said.

That’s when she told me that Friday’s daily stock of paczki had been picked clean before 11 a.m.

Gomez’s co-worker, Daniela Lopez, must have recognized the look of disappointment in my eyes.

She tried to cheer me up.

“We have paczki every day. All year,” Lopez said before handing me a menu of flavors available to make any day a paczki day. “And we won Chicago’s best cheesecake. In 2014.”

I headed home with an award-winning cheesecake and small sack of one neighborhood lady’s third-favorite paczki on the Southwest Side, a lesson learned.

If you’re not prepared with a pre-order — and willing to drive more than 20 minutes away — this Paczki Day might be a not-so-fat Tuesday. Especially for folks like me living in paczki deserts.

You’ve been warned.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

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