Creating community is a honey of an approach to supporting small businesses

For the past 11 years, Northridge’s Humble Bee Bakery & Cafe has tempted locals with organic homemade pastries (think blueberry scones, cinnamon rolls and cookies) and organic plated breakfasts, lunches and weekend brunches, made with locally sourced ingredients.

Top sellers include the eggs Benedict (fixings are piled atop freshly made English muffins) and the café’s signature “Panwich”—a giant fluffy pancake folded around turkey sausage patties and over-easy eggs and topped with a dollop of mascarpone cheese and julienned apples.

Everything is organic, fresh (nothing is fried) and diners can sense the love that goes into all the details—it’s a lesson on how a restaurant doesn’t just survive, it thrives.

Owners James “Jim” (the chef) and Jessica Bonanno (the manager) procure as many ingredients for their farm-to-table dishes as possible from local growers and makers, with the weekly Encino Farmers Market being their primary shopping stop.

They buy most of their produce from John Givens Farm (Something Good) and stone fruit from G Farms, citrus from Sycamore Hill Ranch and potatoes from T & D Farms, to name a few.

Along with supporting local farms, the Bonannos foster community partnerships that serve everyone—the businesses and customers alike—and model the type of support and local connection in their café every day.

The farmers of Sycamore Hill Ranch in Fillmore were looking for a commercial kitchen to rent to expand their bottled juice line. “We recently came to an agreement to trade the use of the commercial kitchen space at [recently closed] Humble Bee Cocina for the citrus that we use at Humble Bee Cafe,” says Jessica Bonanno. “We have had a good relationship with the Hernandez family for years and are grateful for the symbiotic relationship.”

Another connection happened as the result of the couple purchasing hundreds of dollars’ worth of sourdough bread from market vendor chef Lance Toro of Wantz & Kneads. Toro’s bakery has been selling at local markets since 2021.

Their parallel experiences as chefs made Jim Bonanno and Toro fast friends, to the point that one day late last year, Toro shared that he might have to close up his shop. His rent in a Van Nuys industrial neighborhood was sky-high, and he wasn’t making ends meet despite an incredible product and the wildly long hours he was putting in.

Bonanno did some fast thinking. He offered Toro kitchen space at Humble Bee—a “roommate situation” that they both say is working well.

“He saved my business singlehandedly,” Toro says. “He threw me a lifeline, and that gave me an opportunity to keep doing what I love.”

At 58, Toro has decades of LA kitchen stories to tell. He climbed his way to a chef title by the age of 25 by cooking at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, then the Jonathan Club in downtown. Later he helmed Sherman Oaks hotspot Le Café, adjacent jazz club The Room Upstairs, where Alex Trebek or Richard Pryor might stop in for a drink.

“I also won the national chef challenge championship at the World Food Championship in 2015,” he says.

He eventually pivoted and became a private chef; he spent years curating meals for the likes of singer Christina Aguilera, A&M co-founder Jerry Moss and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, among others.

Ultimately, it left him feeling put through the wringer. “In the back of my head, I knew I wanted to open a bakery,” says Toro. Launched in 2019, Wantz & Kneads is the self-taught chef ’s realized dream. Partner Jennifer Newhart came up with the name and runs the back end of the business. The baked goods are made by “an army of one.”

Toro works into the wee hours in the Humble Bee kitchen (since the café only serves breakfast and lunch, it’s a perfect puzzle in terms of schedule), making about 16 sourdough boules at a time in a rainbow of Le Creuset Dutch ovens. He leaves traditional sourdough loaves, made with just flour, salt and water, for the Bonanno’s staff to use and a few to sell.

He sells the rest of his goods at the Thousand Oaks and Ventura farmers’ markets, where he consistently sells out. Among the items you’ll find are jalapeño cheddar loaves, roasted garlic parmesan loaves and sandwich bread—all scored and beautiful to savor, both by sight and taste. Compound butters, cookie/brownie mashups called “crownies” and a rotating array of homemade soups.

For Jim Bonanno, the partnership with Toro dovetails nicely with the restaurant’s emphasis on community, and “trying to keep some semblance of that in a city where it feels like it’s getting lost,” he says.

“In the back of my head, I knew I wanted to open a bakery.” —Lance Toro

“That’s where we like to put our money. We don’t have any large-company products because we’d rather support the community or vendors like us. Why give money to someone who already has it, when you could prop someone else up?” Jim Bonanno says.

By the way, the Bonannos are looking for more farmers and other small businesses to collaborate with.

• Humble Bee Bakery & Cafe and Wantz & Kneads are located at 17321 Saticoy Street in Northridge. For more information, visit HelloHumbleBee.com and WantzAndKneads.com.