By Tara Kyle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
CHELSEA — Bruce Zipes has fashioned custom desserts for a host of big name celebrities, but the delicate art of cake making is something he learned from his father.
Bruce's, a restaurant, café and bakery open since January at Sixth Avenue and 16th Street, represents a recent expansion of a 40-year-old Long Island institution bearing the slogan "Baker to the Stars."
But decades before, at 89th Street and Broadway, his father Harry used to serve up a whipped cream éclair each morning to Upper West Side resident Babe Ruth.
"I always said to my dad ‘why didn't we have an autographed baseball of Babe Ruth's'?" said Zipes, who is now 63 and began helping his father at the age of 13. "We go back a long way in the baking business."
Over the years in Great Neck, Zipes presented look-a-like cakes bearing big name faces to scores of actors, musicians and other icons, including Cindy Crawford, Christie Brinkley, Jon Stewart and Bob Hope.
When he gave a cake to Jay Leno, backstage at the Westbury Music Fair, the talk show host said, "You made me look better than in real life," Zipes recalled.
When he delivered Wayne Newton a dessert frosted with his own likeness, Newton's agent called a few days later to order 45 more cakes for the singer's upcoming birthday party — one for each table.
But Zipes also takes pleasure in the less glitzy aspects of the business.
Sitting inside his new Chelsea restaurant, Zipes rattled off a few recommended dishes, including a "beautiful apple torte" as well as a key lime version.
His personal favorite is a banana pudding free of preservatives and filler, "just straight mashed bananas," he said.
Zipes is also proud of his policy of putting a complementary basket of fresh rolls, muffins, Danishes and coffee cakes on each table at breakfast, lunch and dinner serving. Any freebies restaurant-goers haven't finished at the end of the meal go home with them in a special Bruce's gift bag.
"That way," he said, "we're always in the house."
