West End Bakery: the Belgian house of 1928

1928 — present · 414 West Seventh Street

The boundary, reversed: South Bend's food record carried this bakery as a boundary entry — the best-documented bakery in the two-city record, standing in the other city. Here it is at home, at full size. West End Bakery stands at 414 West Seventh Street, a block from St. Bavo Catholic Church, in the West End the Belgian immigrants built in the early 1900s — a neighborhood equipped, in the Mishawaka historian Susanna Ernst's account, with everything within a few blocks: Flemish-speaking grocery stores, social clubs, banks, bakeries, and its own church. The bakery opened in 1928 and was run by three generations of the Fobe family, Greg Fobe the third, until 2020.

The counter and the rye bread: What the house sells is the neighborhood's daily bread made durable: doughnuts, crullers, creme horns, cakes, breads and rolls, in the listings' and the Tribune's accounts — and one documented thread ties this counter to a loss across the river. In the late 1980s a customer named Andrew Nemeth began driving over from near Notre Dame, following a Hungarian baker from South Bend's former Lentsch Bakery whose rye bread he had fallen in love with, as the Tribune's 2025 account tells it. South Bend's food leg could print the Lentsch Bakery only as a named absence — a house known from that single thread; from this side of the river the thread has a destination and a date, though the baker himself is unnamed in the record reached. Nemeth's loyalty stands in the Tribune's telling as the type of the house's hold: "I stood in line for several hours the last time I thought it was closing in 2020. It's great to know that it's safe."

The two rescues: The closing he feared came that year. Mike Wojtysiak, an accountant, and Jeff Butler bought West End from Greg Fobe in 2020 — "He just didn't want to see another piece of Mishawaka history disappear," as his successor put it — renovated under pandemic restrictions, and reopened it. Wojtysiak died in 2024, and the bakery was run for a time by Anne Marie Butterworth Brill, in WNDU's account, before its second rescue: in 2025 Mishawaka Councilman Matt Mammolenti and Dan Olson, friends since eighth-grade football, completed the purchase from Wojtysiak's family. The fourteen employees stayed; Kathy Leuthold, one of Wojtysiak's three sisters working at the bakery, manages the day to day. The new owners' stated program is preservation with growth — historical photographs on the walls, and a working-through of the house's archive of an estimated 65 doughnut recipes and perhaps 100 pastry recipes. The hours stand in the Tribune's account: 6:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sundays and Wednesdays through Fridays, to 2 p.m. Saturdays.

The Fat Tuesday measure: The region's paczki trade is kept here, and its documented scale is this bakery's. On Fat Tuesday 2026 a dozen workers put in sixteen-plus-hour days and made about 4,700 paczki in nearly a dozen flavors, as WNDU reported on February 17, 2026 — under a new recipe in the new owners' first Fat Tuesday, with lines before opening and a second opening from 4:30 to 7 p.m. after the 1 p.m. close. Three days earlier the Tribune's readers had given West End more than three-quarters of the votes for best desserts among thirty area spots, a poll printed here as a poll. The Tribune frames the house's survival against the losses around it: the Dainty Maid in downtown South Bend in 2016, the north side's Country Bake Shop in 2022. The region's independent bakeries have closed one by one; the Belgian house of 1928 is the one that is left, and it stands in Mishawaka.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, Market Basket (12 June 2025) — the 1928 opening; Greg Fobe, third generation; the 2020 purchase by Mike Wojtysiak and Jeff Butler and the pandemic renovation; Wojtysiak's death the year before; the 2025 purchase by Matt Mammolenti and Dan Olson from Wojtysiak's family; the fourteen employees; Kathy Leuthold; the recipe archive; Andrew Nemeth and the Lentsch rye bread; the hours.
2. WNDU (17 February 2026) — the Fat Tuesday production of about 4,700 paczki in nearly a dozen flavors; a dozen workers on sixteen-plus-hour days; the new recipe; Anne Marie Butterworth Brill's interim running of the bakery after the former owner's death; the extended Fat Tuesday hours.
3. South Bend Tribune (13 February 2026) — the readers' poll on area desserts, thirty spots, West End's three-quarters share, Macri's second at ten percent.
4. South Bend Tribune bakery coverage (June 2025; February 2026) — the frame of losses: Dainty Maid (2016) and Country Bake Shop (2022).
5. "Round the Bend Now and Then," Mishawaka's West End neighborhood episode, with historian Susanna Ernst — the Belgian West End of the early 1900s: Flemish-speaking grocery stores, social clubs, banks, bakeries, and St. Bavo within a few blocks.
6. Religion section of this history — St. Bavo, the Belgian parish at 511 West Seventh Street, a block from the bakery.