This 86-year-old Philly baker still rises to the occasion five days a week

Meet George Wright, a Mount Airy grandfather and a kosher baker for 70 years who works at Deluxe Catering in Strawberry Mansion.

Deluxe Catering owner Daniel Israel wanted to cook up something special for the 86th birthday of his company’s baker, George Wright, but instead of giving him his flours in the form of a cake, Israel wanted someone to tell Wright’s story.

Enter this columnist, stage left.

While Wright hasn’t announced he’s leavening Deluxe anytime soon, his retirement plans are on a knead-to-know basis. When he doesn’t feel like kneading dough anymore, he’ll let you know.

“If I don’t feel like coming in one day, I ain’t coming in,” he said.

But baking is in Wright’s bones. “It’s all I ever did, bake for 70 years,” he told me, and he believes that staying in the business, instead of loafing around, has kept him young.

“If I just sit at home, that’s when you feel older,” he said. “This way, it keeps me mobilized.”

(I was hoping he was going to say the secret to longevity is a glass of wine every night. I don’t know if I’m ready to accept that it’s working past retirement age.)

At 7 a.m. every weekday, Wright rolls into Deluxe’s kosher kitchen in Strawberry Mansion and spends four hours on his feet making 300 to 400 finger-sized, dairy-free servings of glazed fruit tarts, chocolate mousse dollops, and cute little key lime pies, among various other pastries.

He then sends them off with his Deluxe colleagues to events held at places from City Hall to the Bellevue Hotel. Wright doesn’t get to see people enjoy the fruits of his labor, but that doesn’t bother him much.

“As long as I don’t get no complaints, that’s all right,” he said.

Wright — a married father of three and grandfather of nine who lives in Mount Airy — is a man of few words. When he does speak, it is slowly and deliberately, with the faintest echo of a Southern accent from his childhood growing up in Alabama and Georgia. After losing his mom at 9, Wright was raised by his grandmother down South before moving to New York at age 16 to live with his aunt in the Catskills.

It was there that Wright became friends with the son of the owners of a kosher bakery in Ellenville called Albert’s.

“My friend used to have to work, so I would go in with him, and the boss gave me a job and the rest is history,” Wright said.

He began as a cleanup guy, but always watched the bakers at work, eventually making his way to baker himself. Wright was there a few years before moving on to other kosher bakeries in the Catskills and Poughkeepsie, where he often had the chance to learn from Jewish European bakers who immigrated to the U.S. during and after World War II.

I wanted to know what drew Wright into baking and what’s kept him in the profession.

“I liked working with my hands,” he said.

(I made several sly attempts to get Wright to expand on this answer by asking the question in different ways, but he was on to me, each time responding only “I said I liked working with my hands.” I’m honestly surprised he didn’t ask if I had ear plugs in.)

In the 1970s, Wright started visiting a friend in Philly and grew fond of the city. One Sunday morning, while reading The Inquirer, he saw an ad for a kosher baker needed at the Fiddler Coffee Shop and Bakery at 15th and Locust streets. He answered it, got hired, and moved to Philadelphia.

(Wright was not as blown away as me that this story in The Inquirer will truly be a full-circle moment in his career, or maybe he’s just better at hiding it.)

After eight years working at the Fiddler, Wright went to the Montgomeryville Inn, and eventually, the owner asked if he’d like to go in as her partner at the Peter Pan Bake Shop in Lansdale. The two purchased that bakery in 1989 and ran it for 13 years, receiving a dozen reader’s choice awards from a local publication. But they fell on hard times after 9/11 and were forced to close the bakery in 2001.

Wright then took a baking job with Betty the Caterer, a Philadelphia-based kosher catering company, through which he had the chance to work events at the White House and the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

When that company closed in 2023, the owners asked Israel — who owns one of the few locally based kosher catering companies — if he’d take on their staff, including Wright, which he agreed to do.

Wright arrived at Deluxe armed with his own vintage Detecto model 1002-TB baker’s dough scale and the accompanying weight plates. He also brought a box of his recipes and an old radio alarm clock, which is always tuned to WDAS.

(Like the man himself, all of Wright’s stuff is classic.)

Israel, who previously worked at Deux Cheminées, a now-shuttered high-end French restaurant in Philly, was impressed at Wright’s recipe collection.

“A lot of his recipes lined up with the recipes that I had learned from Deux Cheminées,” he said. “The techniques of old French classic cooking are very underutilized in the kosher market, and it’s important to me to bring that out.”

But even more than his recipes, Israel was impressed by Wright’s attitude.

“George has a very calm demeanor and a great work ethic. I thought that he’d be a great part of our culture here,” Israel said.

And indeed, Wright fit right in. Of the company’s 70 employees, “every person has a crush on him,” Israel said.

“Without question, every person at Deluxe Catering loves George,” he said.