How Stone Mountain's Staple Restaurant Got Started

It's impossible to pass through Stone Mountain Village without noticing the five point's beige European-style building that houses the Village Corner German Restaurant and Bakery.

After almost 40 years in the Village and three different locations, the Village Corner is still thriving under the ownership of  husband and wife Claus and Hilde Friese. They moved to the current spot 26 years ago, at first as a bakery only. When the 1996 Olympics rolled around, the two decided to build the restaurant portion and their home above it.

The restaurant has become a staple of the Stone Mountain community. Hilde Friese sat down with Patch this week to talk about how the business started, Oktoberfest and how being a dietitian has influenced her recipes.

Patch: Originally you were just a bakery, correct?

Hilde Friese: An all-natural bakery. We were the first all-natural bakery in Atlanta. We grew so quickly. We moved out of the back room in the old building because we realized the potential of wholesale of all-natural breads. [When we started], we had just a handful of wholesale accounts very locally around here, but within a year, we built that up to about 90 wholesale accounts.

All the big supermarkets did not have natural or all-natural sections; we were one of the first ones moving in with all natural bread and from there, they grew into other products. We were, also within two years, in 12 or 13 natural food stores, there were two chains, and then six and seven eventually, Accounts, stores, all over the Atlanta area.

Patch: Has it always just been German bakery food?

Friese: No, it's a mix. We did all natural bread, which was whole grain bread, but it wasn't necessarily German. On the German breads, I would do breads that are really heavy in rye, because Germans eat more rye bread than anything else, or a mix of whole grain breads.

When I was growing up, having white bread was like having a Sunday fare. We didn't eat white bread as a sandwich, period. When we moved down here, I just couldn't tolerate the squishy Wonder Bread. And that's really why I started baking. We were craving our bread, so I made it at home and gave it away, right and left, to friends and neighbors and sent it with my kids eventually on the bus, to the bus driver, and the teachers and school and that's really how we built it up and it snowballed.

So when my husband lost his job in '74, I had already quite a customer base built up, only they weren't customers: I had been giving it away. But then when he lost his jobs, I told them I couldn't give it away anymore; all of those people supported me wholeheartedly, and I baked for the first three months or so at home in Stone Mountain, and just two to three times a week. In a little wagon, I took the loaves and brought it to my customers and they started paying me for it. It went really quickly. A deli around the corner caught wind of it, and they actually called the newspaper, and the AJC put an article about it. From there, it just went very, very quickly.

Patch: It seems like you’ve put a lot of work into the restaurant and bakery.

Friese: It's a lot of work. I mean, because my husband didn't have a job, we both did it. I would get up, like 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, and punch down the dough that he set. I showed him how to do all of that, like at midnight, and by 3 or 4 I would punch out the dough and do the next one, and it was just going literally around the clock, in our own little oven at home for the first three months. It grew to such a point that we felt, OK, we're going to take our last few pennies from savings. We didn't have jobs, and I was pregnant with our third child.

Most people don't realize the hours that I've worked. My god, for years, I would get up at 3, 4 o'clock and be in the bakery supervising, once we had a real wholesale crew. Claus would get the kids up in the morning to bring them to school. And then I would come home at 3:30 while Claus was out delivering the bread. Kids would come home from the school bus, and then it was taking them to whatever, church choir and soccer and all these things kids are supposed to do.

Patch: Did you do a lot of home cooking?

Friese: I would cook dinner every night. We would not go out, we did not spend money on cheap food. My education in Germany started off as a dietitian, so I was very nutrition-conscious. My kids never had sodas or anything like that. My son would trade his whole-grain bread with his buddy for his white bread. He liked that, and he said that he would eat this like cake. And his buddy loved the bread that I made. And then we would have the whole neighborhood in and I would have whole-wheat pizza dough for dinner for everyone. It was always whole wheat, and all natural and healthy.

One time I was invited to my son's school by the dietitian to show the kids how good whole wheat bread is. So this is what I did: Kids always want to eat what other kids are eating. Krystal was fairly new, with the square little buns, and my daughters just loved those. I said that I could make Krystal, so I made little whole-wheat buns and actually had grated carrots in the dough. It was whole-wheat dough with a little bit of honey in it, and then raw, grated carrots, and then we packaged them ten in a bag, and called in 10 Carat, like the stone, and made square little hamburger buns at home and everybody thought they were good.

Patch: Do you still have the same recipes as when you started? Do you still do a lot of the baking yourself, too?

Friese: Yes, and I do all of the recipes myself. When I get bored, I come up with something new, and everyone goes, “Uh oh, there comes Hilde. New recipes." When I'm in Europe and I come back, I go, "Oh, I saw this, we need to do this."

Patch: What would you say is your personal favorite item right now?

Friese: It changes all the time. If you see the same thing all the time, you want to change. That's the fun in eating, in my opinion. Not having the same thing all the time.

But, I would say our Best Bread. It's called the Best. It's got pumpkin seeds and walnuts in it. No sweetener, no other oils besides what's in the nuts, and it's a mixture of grains. That's probably my favorite year-round bread.

We started doing that because I had a company from Austria come and they introduced us to purple wheat bread, which is an ancient grain that they discovered just a few years ago, literally wild and, like grass, is growing on the alpine roadsides. And they're cultivating it now, but because it had not genetically changed, it is by far healthier. It has probably three times as many antioxidants in them [compared to] our cultured whole wheat right now. He came over and he wanted me to use that. We had been buying it from them for about a year, but shipping it over was not fast enough and it was also very, very expensive. So, I can't get it anymore, but we wanted a similar bread, so that's what we're doing to grains that are here. It's definitely my favorite.

Patch: What would you say is your most popular item?

Friese: That changes with the season, because people eat differently in the summer than in the wintertime. When it's cold, you don't look so much at the calories. The heavier desserts go better while the lighter desserts go in the summer time better. Year-round, really well-selling is our apple strudel and our Granny Smith apple cake, because they're just really German. My mother used to the make the granny apple cake, only with different apples. We use the Granny Smith apples.

Patch: How did you learn how to cook and bake?

Friese: I grew up with a mother who taught us everything because we were involved in the daily family life and with cooking meals everyday, or three meals everyday, not just one. And that's how I raised my kids. I cooked every night, and we rarely, rarely went out, it was only for very special occasions, like birthdays or when we have company. And then I started my education as a dietitian and added nursing to that, then came over here [to the U.S.], so I finished. I did the RN at the state board, but I didn't go back into a dietary aspect of it. I was tired of going to school! I wanted to make money, and just switching from one country to the other and learning a new language and new impressions, and then I got married, it was just a lot at the time.

Patch: What do you guys have coming up soon for the restaurant and bakery?

Friese: We do a few really big things every year. The May Dance is one. That's usually around the first week of May. We have the German dance group here, and they bring an old maypole, and they dance around. We've always had good luck with weather, so we're out of the deck and we open up the parking lot on Main Street for table seating and for them to dance.

Then we have several music events, like Jazz Under the Stars. We have a blues evening outside; that was fantastic. We're probably going to have a rock ‘n roll evening when it's a bit cooler. We would love to sit outside again.

Of course, we have Oktoberfest, and that's the second weekend in October, and that's huge because the whole Village is doing it with us, we're not the only ones. They block the street off in front of us, so it's big. We see about 2,000 people that weekend, between Saturday and Sunday. We have the same German dancers, we book a band, we have another music group.I do a lot of kids activities for that because in Germany, when we have a festival, everybody thinks that all they do is go beer drinking. That's not true. All those festivals are extremely family-oriented. Munich, of course, has the largest Oktoberfest in the world. It's the largest outdoor festival. They draw, I understand, 8 million visitors in two weeks. They start setting the tents up in July, but they're not really tents. They're solid structures. All the big breweries have their own tent. Like, Paulaner, I think, has the largest tent that takes about 5,000 people, but none of them have it smaller than the capacity of 2,000 people. So it's humongous. They have a parking place for strollers, to show you that it's a family festival, because there are carousels and all types of fare. Lots of things that are really fun for children.

And that's what we're trying to do here. I do a lot of kids activities that are really fun, that you won't find anywhere else. We set up a baker's table on the other side so kids can get a piece of dough and they can make a pretzel with it or whatever they like. We bake it off and they get to take that home. We fresh churn butter with them to take home a flake of butter. And a whole bunch of other kids activities.

The little wooden guard standing out front, he stands for the Little Wilhelm Tell. I constructed him two years ago for the Oktoberfest. He gets an apple on his head, and the kids get safety arrows with the suction cups to try to shoot the apple off, and if they hit the apple, they get a fresh apple, and if not, it's just fun to do.

The dance group we have, the German dancers, are really wonderful. They usually show everybody, all the guests, how to dance, and they get people from the audience to dance with them. Kids always love it. They're the best ones. They're just really taking all that in and doing it. And parents love it because it's cordoned off here, the streets are blocked off, it's safe, the kids can run around and do their stuff and they're occupied for quite some time with all the stuff we're planning for them.