Center City Soft Pretzel Co. has finally reopened. Here’s the long, twisted tale of its recovery from a fire.
A year and a half after a fire closed its doors, Center City Soft Pretzel is back, and its 50-foot-long oven, known as the Beast, is churning out pretzels once again.
If not for the memories of her father, Erika Tonelli Bonnett probably would not have reopened Center City Soft Pretzel Co. after a fire shuttered it 18 months ago.
“My father lives in these walls,” Bonnett said at daybreak Monday, as customers double-parked along Washington Avenue and lined up on the sidewalk for their first soft pretzels since Sept. 28, 2022, when an electrical fire destroyed a part attached to Center City’s oven. TV news trucks streamed video as people crammed into the tiny vestibule to buy brown bags and cardboard boxes filled with steaming-hot twists of dough. “I feel his presence.”
For years, Bonnett shared an office with her father, Tony Tonelli, while he smoked cigars and yelled at CNN. In 2016, he and his wife, Marlene, retired to Florida, leaving the bakery in Bonnett’s hands. Tonelli died five years later, at age 71, a little more than a year before the fire that shuttered the 41-year-old business. “To lose him physically and then to lose him yet again — that would have destroyed me,” said Bonnett, 48.
Customers called Bonnett away from the oven for hugs. Someone dropped off tulips for her and her daughter, Giada. Workers scurried from the end of the oven to box up pretzels, some for wholesale customers like the guy who shows up just before 6 a.m. each day for the 150 pretzels he sells to corner stores. “The door isn’t even open yet,” Bonnett said. “He sticks his head through the bottom of the garage door.”
Deana Sabasino, who lives nearby, said that she had not eaten a soft pretzel at all in the last year and half. “I’ve been saving [my carbs] up,” she said.
On that bleak afternoon a year and a half ago, workers were setting up the next day’s bake at Center City Soft Pretzel — which isn’t technically in Center City, but across Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia — when a strange odor filled the air. “All of a sudden, everybody’s going, ‘You smell something?’” Marlene Tonelli said.
Black smoke was filling the back room and billowing out of the extruder, an enormous piece of machinery that pipes the dough into shape. The extruder and its circuitry were fried. So, as it turned out, was the entire building’s electrical system.
It’s not easy to replace a pickup truck-size extruder, Bonnett learned. “It’s not like something you can just run into Home Depot and grab,” she told The Inquirer four months after the fire. “The supply house doesn’t have it because the manufacturer needs to make it, and the manufacturer can’t make it until he has the supplies to make it. It’s ‘supply chain, supply chain, supply chain.’ If I have to hear it one more time, I’m going to put my head through a wall.”
Delays compounded the problems, which turned into more delays. As electricians rewired the building and the wait for the new extruder stretched from weeks into months, the oven belt rusted in place. Commercial baking equipment, like most machinery, functions as a sum of interconnected parts: If one part is broken, the whole thing is broken. Another replacement had to be ordered — cue more delays.
Over the next year, the bakery’s Instagram filled with tales of woe: A photo from February 2023 showed a jumble of trashed lighting and the mangled remains of the electrical panel, with the caption, “When asked what’s taking so long to reopen, here’s the answer. Hope this sheds some ‘light.’”
Throughout 2023, Marlene Tonelli, 73, frequently came up from Florida to help oversee the repairs with her daughter. “I learned that you can’t be nice,” she said. “You have to get down and dirty and they pay attention. I also learned that as women, until you get loud and sound like a truck driver, that’s when they pay attention.”
Believing that the repairs would not take long, Tonelli cleaned out the space and repainted it. “But the electricians used everything in there as a warehouse, so they trashed it,” she said. She had to repaint, again. It felt backward, she said, “like brushing your teeth and then eating an Oreo.”
At one point, Tonelli wasn’t so sure that it was worth pushing forward. “She said, ‘I can’t do this. ‘We’re done, I’m selling the building, I’m selling everything,’” according to Bonnett.
But now Tonelli is in better spirits. “Totally worth it,” she said.
The first day back was a family affair. Bonnett, her long hair twisted in a knot atop her head, tended the oven. Her sister Lorie worked the counter, and her daughter Giada packed and schlepped pretzels.
“This place has been a part of my life since I was 6 years old,” Bonnett said. She was in first grade when her father, Tony — who had an oil-delivery business, repaired heaters, and did construction — opened the bakery to supplement his income. She was diagnosed with diabetes at age 3, “and insurance wasn’t covering a whole lot of insulin at the time,” she said. “My father worked basically to provide for his family and to keep me alive.”
Bonnett worked part time at the bakery since she was a child, but 17 years ago, as she was in her first semester at law school, her father asked her to come to work with him full time. She couldn’t say no.
When Tony stepped away to retire to Florida with his wife, “he said to watch out for the place,” Bonnett said. Since then, she’s largely run it on her own.
The Beast, as Bonnett calls the oven, is back after 18 months. Longer than a SEPTA bus and 6½ feet high, the oven runs at 500 degrees Fahrenheit, turning flour, water, yeast, and salt into pretzels six days a week.
Stand at its gaping maw as the pretzels roll off the conveyor belt on a chilly spring day, with the garage door open at your back, and it’s a toasty 80 degrees. “Now stand right here,” Bonnett said, stepping to the left. “In the summer, it’s 140 degrees.” You can’t open the garage door too high, lest the humidity rise and cause the salt-topped pretzels to sweat.
The bakery door opens at 6 a.m. and stays open till sellout, usually 10 or 11 a.m., Monday to Saturday.
The pretzels are the same as ever — a toasty, brittle finish with a tender bite. Offer some to friends; if you love them, you’ll hand over the doughy center knot. There are not too many snacks like this for under a buck, though inflation has pushed the price of a retail pretzel from 70 cents to just 85 cents.
That didn’t seem to bother John Bielec, an electrician from South Philadelphia, who emerged from the bakery with a bag. He was headed to a work site. “A lot of guys on my job don’t work down here and they all die for these pretzels, so I had to bring them in,” he said.