Smales Pretzel Bakery celebrated 100 years at its home on Xenia Avenue in Dayton on Saturday, October 24, marking the centennial with $1 soft pretzels, limited-edition T-shirts and a drawing for free pretzels for a year, the bakery announced.
The shop at 210 Xenia Avenue has been a Dayton institution since 1926, when Emma Smales moved the business there and gave it the family name. The bakery’s roots run two decades deeper: German-born Rudie Schaaf, who arrived in Dayton as a boy in 1885, opened Gem City Pretzel on Warren Street in 1906, and his daughter Emma carried it to the Xenia Avenue storefront that still operates today.
Five generations on, the bakery is owned and operated by Emma Smales, Schaaf’s great-great-granddaughter and namesake of the woman who renamed the shop a century ago. The pretzels are still hand-twisted from a short list of ingredients — flour, water, yeast and salt — and sold warm from the oven alongside hard pretzels, pretzel babies and house beer cheese.
Smales built its following the slow way, ferrying armloads of pretzels to neighborhood groceries and schoolchildren for generations and running a stand for years inside the downtown Dayton Arcade, where the bakery has returned with a pretzel stand in the renovated North Arcade.
Saturday’s centennial party ran during the bakery’s regular Saturday hours, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and the $1 price was a deliberate throwback for a shop that has kept its pretzels within reach of neighborhood budgets even as food prices climbed around it — a regular large soft pretzel remains one of the least expensive fresh-baked items in the city.
For Dayton, the milestone is about more than one bakery. Xenia Avenue’s Twin Towers neighborhood has watched businesses come and go for a century, and a family shop that has twisted pretzels on the same street since 1926 is a living piece of the city’s German immigrant food heritage.
The bakery keeps limited hours — mornings into early afternoon several days a week on Xenia Avenue, plus its Arcade stand — and regulars advise arriving early, because a century in, the warm pretzels still sell out.
Photo: Fadkins, CC BY-SA