Deep Dive Local: Grand Central Market's Nicole Rucker at Fat & Flour

Nicole Rucker became friends with Lydia Clarke and Reed Herrick at the DTLA Cheese stall before she landed at Grand Central Market in 2019. That date ring a bell? Yep, right at the start of the pandemic we all remember so well. Nicole and the others in the market all banded together, helping each other get through with masses of takeout. Now Fat and Flour is firmly installed at the market, complete with happy-pink columns and cases of Nicole’s signature offerings.

“We make updated American classics, cookies and pies with high-quality ingredients,” she says, though that only hints at the pie-passionate Angelenos who travel long distances for Nicole’s desserts. For Thanksgiving, her stall in Grand Central Market sold 300 alone.

“I don’t think of it as retro or vintage,” Nicole says. “I think that when you hear about pie-baking and cookies, it does give you the warm fuzzies and makes you think that it’s grandma’s hand but…we’re not using lard, we’re using European style butter. It takes three days to make pie dough from beginning to end. Nobody’s grandmas is taking three days to make pie dough.”

Nicole got her start as the pastry chef at The Gjelina Group, and was not only nominated for a James Beard Award, but also came out with her first cookbook: Dappled: Baking Recipes for Fruit Lovers. She’s a veteran blue ribbon-winner and Star Chef at the KCRW Good Food Pie contest. Fiona, her deeply-loved restaurant, closed in 2018, much to the dismay of the community, who missed her famous lime pies. She and her husband Blaine funded construction for her ‘micro-bakery’ at Grand Central Market through a Kickstarter campaign. It raised over $64,000 and rewarded donations with—what else? – slices of pie.

More than anything, Nicole’s baking epitomizes California, no, Los Angeles, because, at its core, is her love of farmers market produce.

“I credit my credit my grandparents on my mother’s side for teaching me the basics of eating and cooking,” she says in her cookbook, Dappled. I can picture my grandpa John gathering hot peppers and tomatoes from the garden and bringing them to the kitchen, to my grandma Camille, where she charred their skins over the flame on the stove. The smell of the peppers is so vivid as a memory, it makes my heart swell just writing this. She then placed the blackened things in a bowl and covered them with plastic wrap to sweat some of the char off before making a salsa. Grandpa grew it, he brought it inside, she transformed it. There was a comforting rhythm in those steps that I would crave to reenact as I became an adult.”

At DTLA’s historic Grand Central Market, Fat and Flour has its diehard fans, and the foodies, of course, but it also has the everyday people who walk through the market for a slice of sweetness and grace.

“We get a lot of people on jury duty,” she says.

And what’s her personal fave?

A boysenberry, or a boysenberry apple, she says. “I actually don’t like lattice crust because it doesn’t cut nice. I prefer just a full top, a full crust pie.”