LAFAYETTE, La. — When a Louisiana original disappears, it takes more than a product with it. It takes the Saturday morning it was tied to, the grandparent who bought it for you, the smell of the store where you found it. Louisiana has lost more of those than most states care to count.
Some of the losses were products. Some were stores. Some were beers, sodas, and bakeries that had been feeding the state since before World War I. Here’s where they went.
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The Bakery That Put the Baby in the King Cake
If you grew up in metro New Orleans any time between the 1930s and 2000, you know McKenzie’s Pastry Shoppes. It started in 1929, when Henry McKenzie opened a bakery on Prytania Street in New Orleans. Daniel Entringer bought the business in 1936 for $83 and kept McKenzie’s name on the door, because the man had a reputation worth preserving.
Over the next six decades, the Entringer family built McKenzie’s into an institution: roughly 50 locations across the metro area, 400 people on the payroll at peak. The products were not fancy. They were perfect. Buttermilk drops. Chocolate turtles. Blackout cakes. Jelly rolls. Petit fours. And, of course, king cakes…