What it takes to run a food business in Los Angeles for 20 years

Valerie Gordon is prone to frequent bouts of laughter. They bubble up inside her petite 5-foot-2 frame and come out at the slightest provocation, like little lightning cackles of joy.

She’s already laughing as she walks through the doors of Valerie Confections bakery and chocolate shop in Glendale on a recent morning, a red-lipped smile on her face and an aura that radiates sunshine.

“Hey, gang!”

The room perks up at the sound of her voice, and staff members pause to say hello.

The smell of chocolate is sweet and heavy in the air. The white-tiled walls are lined with bags of granola, chocolate bars and jams. In a glass case, there are rows of petit fours and chocolate truffles, some gilded with gold leaf, others filled with matcha tea or Champagne.

A wall of treats at Valerie Glendale run by Valerie Gordon and Stan Weightman Jr. The two are celebrating 20 years of Valerie Confections this year.

(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)

Visible through the right wall of the storefront is a temperature-controlled chocolate production room; in the back are two kitchens that also supply the doughs, crusts and batters for her Echo Park cafe and packaging for the products she sells at 200 retailers around the country.

The next phase of Valerie

This is Gordon’s grand flagship store and bakery, a 5,000-square-foot space she intends to use to usher Valerie Confections into the next phase of the global confectionery business, with events and an even bigger online presence.

Over the last two decades, Gordon has become one of the best-known names and faces in L.A. desserts. This year, she celebrates the company’s 20th anniversary. Her Blum’s coffee crunch cake and petit fours are sold nationwide. The ivory boxes and chocolate bars with the name “Valerie” in shiny gold font across the front are instantly recognizable.

On this morning, she’s stopping by the shop to pick up the weekend specials to deliver to Echo Park.

“At 20 years, there are a lot of recipes we’ve been making for decades, but this is great to keep things fresh,” she says.

There are five specials each weekend. Just that morning, she tweaked the milk chocolate frosting on the classic butter cake special.

“You know what? I’m just making this up as I go,” she says. “I’m much happier with it now.”

Gordon says she’s been making it all up as she goes since she was 8 years old. The youngest of four children, she taught herself to bake as a way to self-soothe.

A pistachio olive oil cake with lemon glaze and a topping of pistachios, sumac, coriander and fleur de sel from Valerie Confections.

(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)

“To this day, when I’m upset, I bake,” she says.

In the early ’90s, she started working at restaurants in between acting auditions. She felt she needed to put her college drama degree to use but quickly fell in love with restaurants.

She met her husband, Stan Weightman Jr., in 2000. At the time, he also was working at a restaurant, and they spent their first date talking about food.

“We were one of those insta-couples,” she says.

Valerie Gordon, left, with her husband and partner, Stan Weightman Jr., near the patio of Gordon’s store in Glendale.

(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)

‘A national brand from the get-go’

They put together elaborate gift sets for the holidays, complete with branding that read “Tall and Small Products.” Weightman is more than a foot taller than Gordon.

She developed the food products, and Weightman collaborated with her on the packaging. They started with a total of 10 products that included toffee, chocolates, cookies and sauces.

When the restaurant where Gordon was working closed in late 2003, she decided to focus her efforts on high-end toffee.

“I had been tracking the specialty foods world sort of obsessively and also luxury chocolate, and the thing I noticed in high-end chocolate stores was no one was doing high-end toffee,” she says. “What if I infuse toffee with flavors and it’s presented in a luxury box the way chocolatiers in Paris do?”

She asked Weightman if he wanted to be involved, and the two became partners.

Gordon pored through fashion magazines, mining inspiration from her favorite designers. She was always confident in her recipes, but she wanted packaging and branding that would set her apart.

“In the early stages, it was all about creating a feel that would be perennial,” she says.

A chocolate selection created by Valerie Gordon, who started Valerie Confections with her husband out of their Los Angeles apartment, taking orders over the phone or via fax.

(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)

And she needed to get her desserts into the right stores. She chose 13 around the country, then started booking plane tickets. She put on a pretty dress, walked into each shop and offered up samples of her chocolates and toffee.

Things moved quickly, with a lot of fixation over the right ribbon and the right box. She and Weightman formed their LLC in May 2004 and made their first sale that July. Their first wholesale account was the upscale grocery store and cafe chain Dean & DeLuca.

The two worked out of their Los Angeles apartment and took orders over the phone or via a six-page order form you could fax. Setting up an e-commerce operation cost money the two didn’t have.

Gordon eventually got her products into all 13 stores, in New York; Santa Fe, N.M.; Texas; Seattle; San Francisco; and St. Helena in Napa Valley.

“I wanted to create a national brand from the get-go,” she says. “We were trying to make VC a recognizable name, and we wanted people to recognize the box.”

They sold six flavors of toffee but packaged them in six different boxes, all ivory and brown, and all wrapped with expensive French-milled grosgrain ribbon. Gordon went on to open and then close her first store in Westlake and another location in Grand Central Market. The Glendale shop has been open since late 2022 and Valerie Echo Park has been around since 2013.

‘All right, gang, let’s hit it!’

About an hour later, we arrive at the Echo Park cafe, bakery and marketplace with crates full of desserts. Gordon gathers the staff in the kitchen to go over the specials.

The shiitake scramble from Valerie Echo Park is one of the signature dishes at the cafe, bakery and marketplace.

(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)

“All right, gang, let’s hit it,” she says, then bursts out in another cheerful laugh. “This is a cherry pie with marzipan. Then you’ve got the salted caramel parfait. It’s caramel pudding. I know!”

She slices a piece of the butter cake, the yellow and chocolate layers pristine and well defined. The cake is moist and springy and the smooth chocolate frosting is pure velvet.

“Isn’t that just so fun? I’m so happy. Yay!”

Gordon is her own best hype woman. Her enthusiasm is infectious and a little dizzying as everyone around her starts to laugh, chew and nod in approval.

The blanched almond cake with roasted apricots is next, grainy and full of a fruit compote. The cherry pie features a layer of marzipan and a golden crumble topping. For the most part, they’re impeccably prepared desserts you recognize. Those you might not are presented in a way that makes them feel instantly familiar.

On the regular cafe menu, there’s a small selection of savory sandwiches and salads. Eggs come scrambled with shiitake mushrooms and a slab of garlic butter toast. There’s quiche and a smoked salmon banh mi.

Gordon walks me through a small marketplace area at the front of the cafe where she carries Rooted Fare sesame crunch butter, New York Shuk Shawarma BBQ sauce, Bowlcut chili crisp and a variety of other products from small vendors.

“We were never the flashy, new thing,” says Valerie Gordon. “We are consistent.”

(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)

“We were never the flashy, new thing,” Gordon says. “We are consistent and there’s a customer base in the neighborhood that really relies on us to feed them. For that, I’m so appreciative.”

When the COVID lockdown started, Gordon never closed the cafe, transitioning overnight to a marketplace. She used her label maker to repackage flour, sugar, yeast and other wholesale items she thought the neighborhood would need, then ordered more.

“It was like Valerie Market,” she says. “We never closed. That kept us going.”

Gordon’s ability to be nimble is one of the main reasons she believes she and Weightman were able to make it to 20 years. When she opened Valerie Echo Park, she envisioned it as a place for afternoon tea. But when the neighborhood didn’t show up, she turned it into the bustling cafe it is now. When the economy tanked in 2008, she lost thousands of dollars after frontloading chocolates and petit fours from promising projections and big catalog orders that never came through.

“It was so bad that I had to borrow money from my mother,” she says. “But it’s important to be able to recognize that if you are losing money doing something, change it.”

Gordon developed a line of jams and baked goods to sell at farmers markets.

“It forced this whole expansion of the company that wasn’t in our plan and I would have never predicted,” she says. “There is always a tunnel, you just have to figure out what the tunnel is.”

Gordon became known for much more than her chocolates and toffees, transitioning the business to a full bakery and confection company between 2008 and 2011.

“I had a cookbook deal come through, I was doing morning TV, and one of the key things that helped me grow was the Blum’s coffee crunch cake,” she says.

A Blum’s coffee crunch cake from Valerie Gordon. The cake is beloved and sold nationwide through Goldbelly.

(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)

In 2009, an editor at the Los Angeles Times magazine asked Gordon if she remembered the Blum’s coffee crunch cake, a dessert popularized at the erstwhile Blum’s California bakery chain. She spent a month reverse engineering the chiffon cake with coffee whipped cream and shards of crisp and chewy honeycomb. Now, it’s her bestselling cake, available to order nationwide.

When we arrive back at the Glendale cafe, Gordon gives me a tour of the facility, stopping in one of two kitchens to consult with chef Angela Chan, who is busy working on that weekend’s afternoon tea menu.

“Look at this little panna cotta!” Gordon says. “It’s cute, it’s nuts, it’s wild!” Another laugh escapes and fills the room.

Serving afternoon tea is something Gordon always wanted to do, but it never seemed to be the right place or moment. With a spacious patio shaded by passion fruit vines off to the side of the building, she felt it was finally time for tea.

Her panna cotta is infused with the subtle floral notes of jasmine and nutty black sesame. It will be presented alongside a lavender shortbread, chocolate raspberry tartlet and rose petal petit four. Before the sweets, there will be curry chicken on one of Chan’s mini milk breads, a tea egg with pickled daikon and a smoked salmon tartine. Fluffy scones will be served with a sharp blood orange curd and salted butter.

A high tea set from Valerie Glendale, available weekends on the patio.

(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)

Gordon continues to release new bakery items and chocolate bars, and she recently redesigned her “Eat Me” line of truffles. She started a weekly newsletter and often uses it as a platform to support other female-owned businesses. She’s working on another cookbook and wants to travel, spend more time with her two children, prioritize self-care and work out.

She tells me all this as she ricochets around the space like a pinball, in constant motion in her bakery, cafe and out in the world.

“The fact that we made it to 20 feels pretty good, and I’m trying very much to celebrate, but I’m not great at it,” she says, already distracted by a new batch of tea eggs on the kitchen counter. “It’s a hard time to run a food business in this great city and great state, but we’ve become a part of a lot of people’s traditions, and that feels pretty good.”