Editor’s Note: This is the 1st chapter in Volume 3 of Editor Emeritus Donald H. Harrison’s 2022 trilogy, “Schlepping and Schmoozing Along the Interstate 5. All three books as well as others written by Harrison may be purchased from Amazon.com.
Schlepping and Schmoozing Along the Interstate 5, Volume 3: Exit 36 (Via de la Valle): Milton’s Deli
From northbound Interstate 5, take the Via de la Valle exit, and turn right (east). Then make a quick left into the Flower Hill Promenade. Milton’s Deli’s address is 2660 Via de la Valle.
DEL MAR, California – It is not unusual for customers to see Milton’s Multi-Grain bread on display at Milton’s Deli, and ask, ‘Wait, are you the same Milton’s who makes the bread?”
Yes, it is the Milton’s who created the bread. However, after producing it in 20 bakeries across the country, the bread business was sold to an investment arm of the Mitsubishi conglomerate in Japan. Mitsubishi continued to produce the bread and crackers under the Milton’s brand name.
The success of the bread was the second time that Barry Robbins and his retired major partner, David Levy, had a food product hit the big time nationally. In fact, Levy once commented to Orange County Magazine that the success of the bread was “déjà vu all over again.” Before there was Milton’s Bread, there was Chicago Brothers’ Pizza.
Robbins’ older brother, Fred, had moved to Los Angeles from Chicago and told Robbins that his one big disappointment on the West Coast was that it didn’t have any good deep-dish pizzas like the ones they enjoyed in Chicago.
Robbins and Levy, who had been friends since they were 12 years old, thought maybe they should learn the Chicago-style pizza business and bring it out to the West Coast. So, after attending different colleges in Illinois, Robins, Levy, and Bob Steinborn went to work at pizza restaurants in Illinois, each learning the trade. Robbins and Steinborn worked at Garcia’s Pizza in Champaign, Illinois. Levy learned the business at Gulliver’s Pizza in Chicago. At their homes, the three partners experimented with different kinds of dough.
“At 21 years old, as soon as we got out of school, we drove out to Santa Barbara, where we started,” Robbins recalled during a March 2022 interview. For about six months, the young partners operated a concession at FUBAR selling deep-dish pizza by the slice to rock n’ roll fans. While Santa Barbara was as beautiful as they heard, business there was unpromising. They decided to relocate somewhere else in Southern California. They each scouted different locations, with Steinborn dispatched to the San Diego area.
As young entrepreneurs, without any previous experience owning a restaurant, it was not easy to find a landlord who would take a chance on them. But Hyman Dosick—father of Rabbi Wayne Dosick—came from Chicago and knew how popular deep-dish pizza was there. So, in 1977, he gave Steinborn, Robbins and Levy a chance, renting to them a location behind a gas station at Baltimore Drive and Fletcher Parkway in La Mesa. “It wasn’t the greatest location,” Robbins said, but undeterred, the partners contracted with public-relations specialist Laura Walcher to make them famous. “She was awesome!” Robbins declared.
Walcher persuaded Jack White, a Channel 10 KGTV anchor and food reviewer, to sample their pizza. “He did the review on a Friday and we had to take the phones off the hook; we couldn’t keep up,” Robbins said.
Not long thereafter, Dr. Larry Fine, an ophthalmologist, “came into the restaurant, saw me working, really liked it, and said, ‘Hey, if you ever need money, give me a call. I like what you guys are doing.’ So about two weeks later, I called him, and said, ‘You know that money you offered?’ He ended up joining us as a partner. He helped bolster our income.”
Pizza then was a dinner-time business. “We were opening around 4 o’clock and stayed open five hours a day,” Robbins recalled. “I thought what else can we do with this? We’re paying rent. We’re not open all that long, so I came up with the idea of frozen pizza. I brought it into Big Bear, which was the local market at the time. A gentleman by the name of Gino Mattera took us under his wing, put us in the first Big Bear, and we started selling the pizza frozen. We literally made it hot in the morning in the restaurant and brought it over and put it in their freezer case. That business started growing at the Big Bears.”
The success of their venture encouraged Robbins and Levy to open other Chicago Brothers outlets including a third one in Pacific Beach. That one was occasionally frequented by Robert Price and other executives from the Morena Boulevard headquarters of the Price Club, which was a forerunner of Costco. The executives suggested that Chicago Brothers might want to sell their frozen pizzas at their warehouse stores. You bet they did. “We were the first frozen item to ever be in a Price Club.”
Initially, Chicago Brothers had its frozen food factory on Mission Gorge Boulevard in the Allied Gardens neighborhood of San Diego. Later it moved to larger quarters on Miramar Road in the Mira Mesa area. Eventually the frozen pizza business eclipsed that done by the partners’ four Chicago Brothers pizza stores. The other partners left the restaurant business to focus on the frozen pizza business. In 1981, “we took in another friend named Craig Stethman who was an attorney to help us with the frozen. I was the last one to leave the restaurant. As we grew, they asked us to make lasagna, which became really big.”
Among the fans of Chicago Brothers pizzas was Los Angeles Dodgers Manager Tommy Lasorda, who cut commercials and appeared at live events for the company. He posed with a Chicago Brothers pizza box for a photo that appeared in Sports Illustrated, giving national exposure to the brand. Lasorda also took a minor equity role.
What makes a good pizza? In Robbins’ opinion, the key is the dough. ‘The rest of it is pretty generic; someone might have a better sauce than others and you have to have quality toppings, but the dough is the part that you make by hand every day and I think it is what differentiates it.”
At their Mira Mesa factory, Robbins and Levy had a work force of 500 people. They were starting to underbid Schwan’s Foods for some school lunch contracts. That prompted Schwan’s to buy Chicago Brothers in 1992, with Steinborn dropping off and Robbins and Levy taking positions with the national company. Having thereby eliminated the competition, Schwan’s eventually took Chicago Brothers off the market. The brand disappeared from grocers’ shelves.
In 1995, Levy and Robbins opened Milton’s, which was named in memory of Levy’s father, who had “always helped us on our leases and ideas,” Robbins said. “He had a lumber yard called Handy Andy in Chicago, and he kind of mentored us through the years.” Robbins and Levy realized that there was no deli in the Del Mar area like D.Z. Akin’s in San Diego and found this “great location” on Via de la Valle in Del Mar. “Dave and I were ready after three years working for Schwan’s to do our own thing again.”
Robbins admits that initially they didn’t know enough about the deli business. A long line of people was waiting to be seated on opening day, and the crowd overwhelmed the inexperienced kitchen. People had to wait 45 minutes or more for their sandwiches to be delivered to their tables. “It was a mess and chaotic and a struggle,” Robbins said. “We had so many recipes to learn. A deli is a very difficult business. You have to make everything from scratch. It’s very labor intensive and the first year was very difficult.” For other restaurants a first year like that might have been a disaster, but there was a hunger in the North County for a delicatessen, so customers remained patient as Robbins and Levy perfected the business.
At the time, Robbins was living in Fairbanks Ranch with his first wife, Patty. A neighbor, Claire Allison, loved to make bread, and Patti suggested that Milton’s take on a bakery line. With Allison, who came to work for Milton’s when it opened, the company developed the multigrain bread that became famous. Encouraged by customer comments, Robbins and Levy arranged to make a presentation to the Costco food buyers. Because of their track record with frozen Chicago Brothers foods, they had no difficulty obtaining an appointment.
Robbins said he brought a toaster, some butter, and a loaf of bread to a meeting with Costco buyer K.D. Dalton. She later described it as one of the worst presentations she had ever witnessed. “I didn’t have prices; I had nothing but the bread, butter, and the toaster,” Robbins recalled. After tasting a slice, “she [Dalton] said, ‘Well this is good, can you pull it off?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we did it with the pizza. We can do it.’ She said, ‘All right, we’ll put you in a club’ and she did. It just took off unbelievably. It became the number-one selling bread in all of Costco and we got into crackers. That business dwarfed the restaurant business. David [Levy] left the restaurant and opened a little office down the road for the bread. Once again, I stayed back … The fact was that the bread was healthy, and it tasted so good. It was the right time with the right product. It grew and grew, and I eventually joined the office there.”
To manage the restaurant, Robbins hired Maria Colyer, who was promoted to a partnership in 2021. “She kept the restaurant going while we focused mainly on the bread and then the crackers. We were in Costco’s and Trader Joe’s and it became a very big business.”
Milton’s licensed bakeries across the country to bake the bread, using its recipe. Unlike the frozen Chicago Brothers pizza, this operation required much fewer people on the local payroll. “We were basically a marketing company,” Robbins said. “Trader Joe’s came on a couple of years after Costco. I called the buyer—her name was Lori Lotta – and said, ‘we’d like to get into Trader Joe’s, and she said, ‘well, we’ve heard of you, but everything here is Trader Joe’s brand.’ I said, ‘we can’t do it; we have to build our brand. So, if you want it, it has got to be Milton’s.’ She said, ‘All right, I know what it is. Let’s talk price.’ So, the funny part of this story is that I have never met her to this day, and she was our second or third biggest account!”
Claire Allison, the baker from whom Milton’s purchased rights to the recipe, went on to open her own restaurant in Solana Beach, called Claire’s on Cedros.
For Milton’s customers who remember Chicago Brothers, Milton makes up frozen pizzas every day and sells them from a freezer at the front of the tore. “We sell about 100 a week,” Robbins said. “We still make it the same way we did 40 years ago.”
Of course, at a deli, people do not dine on bread or pizza alone.
Milton’s Menu is packed with options both for meat eaters and vegetarians.
Name the meat and they’ve got it, and of course you can have them in combinations, on plates, or in dips. Selections include corned beef, pastrami, roast beef, turkey, brisket, tongue, turkey pastrami, kosher salami, kosher bologna, liverwurst, chopped liver, tuna salad, chicken salad, whitefish salad, ham (it is a non-kosher deli), bacon (see, I told you), lox, hot dogs, and knockwurst.
According to Robbins, the Reuben sandwich is one of Milton’s biggest sellers, consisting of corned beef or pastrami piled on grilled rye bread, with melted Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing. Another is matzo ball soup, which is so popular Robbins said he would try, if he were younger, to mass-market a frozen variety. “I thought of having one more hurrah, but I’m 68 and I don’t know that I have it in me to try another bug venture, but I know it would be a winner,” he said.
There are menu options for vegetarians, among them: grilled portabella mushroom with onions, pepper, provolone cheese on a multigrain roll; avocado, sprouts and red onion and cheese on multigrain bread; and a veggie Reuben consisting of fresh eggplant, avocado, tomatoes, Swiss cheese and sauerkraut on grilled rye bread.
The secret of a good deli, in Robbins’ opinion, is having everything made fresh. “We are making fresh batches of soup every day. We have fresh turkey. We buy the best meat. We get our fish from New York, our bagels from New York. We have four prep people working full time and we have our own bakery.”
Robbins’ passions are not limited to restaurants, and restaurant owners in the family are not limited to Barry Robbins.
Robbins is a member of Temple Solel, to which he gave financial support during its building campaign. “My dad, Henry, was a pretty religious guy,” he said. “I moved him out here to Whispering Palms from Chicago when we opened. He went to temple every Saturday. He liked it. My wife, Nicole, teaches Sunday school there. My daughter Sadye attends Solel. She is 11 and is preparing for her bat mitzvah. She is named after my mom, Sadie.”
Robbins also collected high-end luxury cars. For six months, he even had a high-end limousine company, Arrive like Royalty, which drove customers around in such automobiles as a Maybach 57 S, a fully loaded Lexus LS 460L, a Mercedes S600 sedan, a Mercedes GL 450 SUV Brabus, and a GMC Denali SUV
The head-turning Maybach 57 S was the crown jewel of the collection, and on occasion, Robbins dispatched himself as the chauffeur. “Here I am at the pinnacle of my career, driving people around,” the millionaire joked when the company debuted in 2008. “But what better way to learn the business and do something I love?”
After six months, however, Robbins decided the limousine business was going nowhere. He has since sold his car collection and is back at work at the restaurant.
“COVID-19 was obviously incredibly scary,” he said. His partner David had left a year prior to its onset, and Maria Colyer, who had been with Milton’s for over 20 years, succeeded him. “She was by my side and worked with me through COVID-19. There were some scary days. Not only medically. People were getting COVID-19 left and right, and employees as well, but there were days we had more employees than customers. We stuck through it. My employees stuck by me, a tribute to them. So many restaurants are complaining about staffing, not being able to get anybody. They’re closing for lunches, or for days, and I haven’t had to close a day. They’ve been with us all the way.” Milton’s had approximately 60 employees at the time of the interview, “many of them for over 20 years.”
Robbins credited federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans for helping his restaurant survive “during the darkest of times.” Additionally, he said, Milton’s was able to build up its “to go” business through such services as Door Dash. “I am grateful that we got through it. I learned a lot and it forced me to be here every day and lead the way. If I didn’t come, I couldn’t expect anyone else to come.”
Another restaurateur in the Robbins family is his son Robby Robbins, who along with partner Shane Stanger, has opened a chain of specialty ice cream shops called The Baked Bear. In what seems a repeat of history, a Robbins family member teamed up with a former classmate (in this case at Torrey Pines High School) and opened the Baked Bear in Pacific Beach in 2012.
Subsequently they opened another outlet in the Carmel Mountain neighborhood of San Diego. They also have expanded to San Francisco and have 33 locations across the country. In Long Branch, New Jersey, in 2021, Robby Robbins showcased a Mexican hot chocolate cookie and blackberry crumble ice cream sandwich. In North Bethesda, Maryland, a vegan gluten-free chocolate chip cookie and vegan chocolate chip ice cream combination caused a stir. In San Diego, a favorite for beachgoers is a five-layer chocolate chip cookie, strawberry ice cream, brownie, chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, topped by an M&M cookie.
Taking a leaf from his father’s 200-item menu, Barry Robbins offers an amazing array of combinations. Karen Billing of the Del Mar Times in 2013 noted that “cookies come in white chocolate macadamia nut, peanut butter, red velvet, snicker doodle, funfetti cake or gluten free chocolate chip.” Between any combination of these cookies, one may order a large variety of ice creams “in flavors such as chocolate, mint, mint chocolate chip, strawberry cheesecake, coffee, butter pecan, or mango strawberry sorbet.”
Barry Robbins said he had suggested to his son “to pick a friend that you trust and you know and then find an idea. Our idea was to take something from somewhere else that was a proven success—the pizza—and bring it here. We had a friend who always talked about Diddy Riese in Westwood selling cookies and ice cream with people literally lined up out the door every day. They were very inexpensive, $1.50 to $2 originally, but the lines were insane. So, I told Robbie, ‘Go check it out.’ So, long story short, he did. He got a partner. He got a great location in Pacific Beach, and he ran with it. My daughter Katie was my manager here with David’s daughter, Ashley. They were both here working with Maria, and Robby ‘stole’ her away from me. No, seriously, I wanted her to have whatever was a better opportunity.”
When David retired, Ashley also left Milton’s, resulting in Colyer taking on more and more responsibilities and a partnership in the company.
Pizza, Deli, Ice Cream – the Robbins are a family understands the casual foods that Americans love to eat!
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com