Nick Kociolek
This content was originally published in December 2015 and was edited with updated information.
You may have driven past The Kiffle Kitchen Bakery the last time that you drove along Route 512. You may have heard about its recent successful airings on QVC. It’s possible that you’ve even eaten one of their pastries without knowing where the delicious treat had come from. For Lee Kociolek, the Kiffle Kitchen’s founder, producing high-quality baked goods is the lifeblood of her business and one that she’s proud to pass on to her sons.
From the Basement to Bath
It all started with kiffles. For those who are unaware, a kiffle is a Hungarian pastry that is similar in appearance to a flat, rolled croissant with a sweet and often fruity filling. With its unmistakably light and flaky pastry portion and its fillings ranging in flavor from apricot and cherry to poppy seed, this variation on a cookie is traditionally enjoyed around Christmastime. For Lee, however, the kiffle was just what she knew how to bake and how to bake well.
Using her Baba’s recipe, Lee began baking from her home in 1985. Contrary to the customary tradition of eating kiffles around Christmas, the majority of Lee’s early orders were placed for wedding receptions. “A lot of people see me and know us as the Kiffle Kitchen for Christmas,” she says, “but I really started out with orders for weddings.”
Lee’s dedication to hand-rolling each and every kiffle resulted in unrivaled taste and repeat customers. As business continued to grow and the orders started piling up, she saw opportunity in the form of expansion. Eventually, Lee decided that she would run a proper bakery from her home instead of her pieced-together facility in the Kociolek basement. “The idea of opening a bakery just popped into my head,” she says. “I loved food and dessert, and one day I just decided to do it.”
By 1986 Lee Kociolek was making kiffles from her own home bakery. Order after order, kiffle after kiffle, word continued to spread about the top-notch baked goods being sold from the Kociolek household, and what began as a way to earn some money for her family turned into Lee’s life’s work, her career and what has now become her masterpiece. Six years later, in 1992, business was so good that it was time for another upgrade. Lee and her husband, Frank, decided that it was high time the bakery be moved out of their home. The Kocioleks found a good location, and the kiffle operation was moved to what would become its permanent home base at 589 Moorestown Drive in Bath. Still there today, the Kiffle Kitchen’s commitment to quality continues and has allowed it to extend its reach beyond the realm of basement-made kiffles.
More Than Just Kiffles
While most people assume that the bakery solely makes kiffles and only sells them during the holiday season, this is not the case. The Kiffle Kitchen is open year-round and makes a mouthwatering variety of baked goods. “It still never ceases to amaze me,” Lee says. “[Recently, a] distant neighbor, out walking her dog, said to me ‘I come up every Christmas!’ But you don’t have to wait just for Christmas.”
This common misconception is one that the Kociolek family strives to remedy. “We aren’t just kiffles and holidays, we are the best bakery in the Valley…We make assorted cupcakes, sticky and cinnamon buns, shoofly pie, assorted cookies, tossies, Hungarian rolls…[and] rugala.” The list continues, and customers have continued to be more than satisfied with the bakery’s pastries since its mid-1980s onset. This unanimously good reception stems from something that is increasingly harder and harder to find: a human touch.
Hand-Rolled Heaven
In the world of handheld updates, instant gratification and machine-made nourishment that humans currently exist in and exist on, Kiffle Kitchen serves as a reminder that sometimes the best things are made from scratch. In fact, every item made in Lee’s kitchen has always been made from scratch.
Do a quick Google search of Kiffle Kitchen, and you’ll find every write-up is littered with the phrase “hand-rolled.” Jasmine Lewis of the News-Sun writes of Lee’s “delicious fruit-filled, hand-rolled pastry dough.” Kelly Huth of lehighvalleylive.com wrote that Kiffle Kitchen “produces about 10,000 hand-rolled kiffles daily.” A recent article in The Morning Call says that their treats “are made from scratch from a cream cheese and butter dough which is rolled [out] paper thin by hand.” Even we here at Style wrote of the “light, flaky, hand-rolled, fruit-filled indulgence” being “tough to resist” back in 2009.
Lee credits Kiffle Kitchen’s success to the time, effort and passion being put into each and every item. She says, “I don’t serve ‘good’—it has to be really tasty. We’re all sticklers on the quality.”
A Family Affair
As the business continues to grow, it’s increasingly becoming a family-run operation. Along with her husband, Lee’s two sons, Chris and Nick, have helped turn the bakery into the large-scale business that it is today. “My boys have really stepped in to make the business grow,” Lee says. “Chris is on the physical end whereas Nick is doing promoting.”
Both boys play a crucial role in shaping the image of the bakery. On the topic of family involvement, Nick says, “If it [weren’t] for all four of us, we would never be where we are today. The pride we take in making our pastries and baked goods really shines through [in] the finished product. When you bite into our pastries, you can almost taste the time and hard work that was put into making each and every one of them.”
“Sold Out” Success
The Kociolek family has pride in what they do, and it shows. Thus, it’s no surprise that their business has performed phenomenally at the national level not only once but three times in 2015. That year, someone from QVC proposed that Kiffle Kitchen should sell its best-selling kiffles on a show.
When QVC first approached the Kocioleks with the idea, the entire family got excited, and rightfully so. Regardless of if the show would sell a large quantity of kiffles, it was an opportunity for them to get their name out there in a large, televised way. They would undoubtedly sell some kiffles, and it would allow for the possibility of repeat appearances if they sold enough. No one expected what was to follow.
“When I was live on air and the…producer said the two magic words in my earpiece, ‘sold out,’ I instantly had a smile on my face,” says Nick. The bakery’s kiffles sold out in a remarkable five minutes. A sell-out show on QVC, and a quick one at that, is something that Kiffle Kitchen is deservedly proud of—it’s no small feat. Something along the lines of only 20 percent of shows sell out.
Nick says, “I was so excited just thinking [that] all the people who have never tried our kiffles will finally get to try what I believe is one of the finest pastries available.” After the show was over and the family-wide high of excitement wore down, the Kocioleks had a startling realization: the 55,000 kiffles sold on the show weren’t going to bake and pack themselves. This type of challenge, however, is one that the Kocioleks live for.
Repeat Appearances
After the unexpected and welcomed success of their first appearance, Kiffle Kitchen was asked by QVC to do a second show. And then a third. Nick and his brother Chris are hopeful that continued appearances at the national level will allow them to continue the saga of success that the bakery has experienced thus far. “I could probably write a book highlighting our family business over the last 15 years,” Nick says, “and I’d probably still run out of pages.”
There’s no limit to how high they can take the business. They want it to grow. On reaching nationwide, household recognition, Nick says, “I believe I can do this by continuing to make our pastries by hand and from scratch, the exact way my mom did 30 years ago out of our basement. That is something I will never allow to change.”
Making Mom Proud
Lee is in awe of her sons. “I’m very proud that my boys have taken it to this level,” she says. “This is a level that I could not have taken it to—the internet and QVC. I’m not saying that I don’t have the mentality, but I’ve never used a computer. I call myself a dinosaur!”
It’s this level of success that stands as a true testament to the quality of the products that Kiffle Kitchen puts out. In this business, machines can’t beat hands. The dinosaur prevails over automated production lines. Passion from the Kociolek family comes to life in each and every baked good that they make, be it the sell-out-good kiffles or the brownie bars. In the future, the Kociolek brothers will undoubtedly take their mother’s generations-old recipes and staunch commitment to quality to new venues that Lee could never have predicted whilst baking out of her home decades ago. These things are what continue to separate Kiffle Kitchen from its competitors.
With the addition of a retail shop to the Bath location and a satellite presence at the Allentown Fairgrounds Farmers’ Market, Kiffle Kitchen is slated for a bright and successful future. The Kocioleks love saying hi to and hearing from their customers, so head to 589 Moorestown Drive to see the booming bakery Lee and her boys have created.
610.759.2965 | kifflekitchen.com
