Meet Tim Costa, New Roma Bakery owner and bread baker
Through the end of September, we’re celebrating the people who, every day, make life in the Sacramento region meaningful and interesting. Through 12 stories, a collection of short profiles, you’ll “Meet your neighbors.” Read more here.
A light stays on through the night at the bakery on the corner of 18th and E streets.
Inside, heat builds in the brick oven, holding warmth from late at night until its door opens early in the morning.
That’s when Tim Costa cranks open the oven door, revealing the chamber carved into the back wall of New Roma Bakery.
The 68-year-old retrieves a board full of unbaked loaves and reaches for the long wooden peel racked above his head. He spreads flour across the oar, and some gently falls past his white apron, onto his black sneakers, where a layer already exists from the late nights and early mornings before.
He lifts the dough into the 14-by-14-foot oven, a process he repeats from left to right, covering the glowing brick bottom with the same bread, made with the same recipe, since 1934.
“This is a lost art, making it by hand,” he says.
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Years ago, workers from the nearby Blue Diamond plant would walk in through the back door and drop cash in a tin coffee can, leaving with bread in exchange. Costa watched that customer base shrink, as neighboring businesses big and small came and went.
Outside, food itself changed, too. More preservatives and ingredients. At New Roma, the same simple recipe is baked in the same oven.
For all its consistency, not all is as was.
The hours are shorter, the customers fewer. Prices remain lower than you would expect but higher than they once were.
“Everything changes,” Costa says. “A lot of people say, ‘How do you stay in business?’ You just keep going.”
Eventually, he pulls each loaf from the wall and into the world, revealing the bricks beneath. The sign flips from closed to open and the front door unlocks.
The neighborhood outside wakes up. Morning turns to night. Midtown evolves and the light at 18th and E streets stays on.
