Heartfelt Letter Could Be Dream Recipe For Success Seattle Bakery Owner Will Give Business To Essay Contest Winner

Joyce’s Bakery is for sale - not to the highest bidder, but to the most persuasive dreamer to enter the “American Dream Essay Contest.”

The winner gets the bakery and restaurant that was owner Joyce Robbins’ dream when she opened the place five years ago.

“We’re not guaranteeing someone’s success, but what a way to start!” Robbins, 37, said during a recent midmorning lull.

Around her were 11 round tables - enough to seat 44 people - covered with white cloths and topped with blue vases holding fresh flowers. The ceiling is decorated with clouds, a recurring Seattle theme. The bakery case still features cheesecake brownies and cheesecake made from her grandmother’s 100-year-old recipes.

When she started her business in a North Seattle neighborhood in 1993, she was Joyce Rubin, fresh from a professional pastry school in Manhattan.

She’d spent six years on Wall Street in venture capital and earned a master’s in business administration at Dartmouth, but big business lost out to small business and her grandmother’s recipes.

She started out offering coffee and pastry. Now the “bakery” has a liquor license and a menu that offers soup and sandwiches at lunch time, and salmon dinners and chicken pot pie in the evening.

“It really is a part of the community,” Robbins said. “We have people who have met here. We have toddlers walking around here who weren’t born when I started this place.”

She met her husband, Clay Robbins, when he started dropping in for Danish. They married in 1995 and are ready to start a family.

Robbins hopes the essay contest turns up a someone who will love the place like she does, so it can remain a part of the neighborhood.

“It was very important to me … to be part of the community. When I think about it that way, it makes it easier to let go,” she said.

“I look at someone in culinary school, just getting out, making eight bucks an hour - who’s going to loan them a quarter of a million dollars to start out?”

“It’s more than just a bunch of equipment in a space. You give it to someone and you give them a chance,” said Robbins, who created the restaurant from an empty shell in the ground floor of a four-story apartment building.

“I have a successful real estate business, so we don’t really need her income,” said her husband, 43. “And she’s made this place very successful.

“For us, it’s a way of passing on that good fortune.”

They got the idea for their essay contest when they saw a similar contest for a house.

“We found out it’s perfectly legal, we talked to the attorney general and everything,” Robbins said. “You can give away anything you want, but it can’t be a lottery. It has to be a contest of skill.”

So, would-be entrepreneurs: How skillfully can you pitch your dream?

For a $100 fee, applicants can submit an essay of 200 words or less on one sheet of paper “explaining why you think you should win the restaurant, what you would do if you owned it, or why you want to own your own business,” the application form says.

A panel of neighborhood residents will choose the winner, who gets the restaurant, all its physical assets - tables, chairs, inventory, an $80,000 industrial oven and an $8,000 espresso machine - plus $5,000 cash.

The Robbinses hope to attract 3,500 applicants by March 31 to recoup at least some of Joyce Robbins’ original investment. The $90 entry fee will be refunded if the contest does not attract enough applicants, though the $10 handling fee is nonrefundable.

“We could sell it,” Robbins said. “The guy who buys it can probably afford a quarter-of-amillion dollar business, but he’s probably not going to care about it as much.”

Regular customer Terry Higgins thinks the contest “is an absolutely outstanding idea. It gives somebody a chance to start a business that might never, ever have the capital to do it.”

She said she hopes to persuade her brother to enter. She is part owner of his restaurant in Spokane.

Robbins recognizes the risk that someone will take the $5,000 and sell off the bakery. Or worse.

“I’m someone who does something 100 percent,” she said. “If I give it to somebody, it’s 100 percent and it’s theirs to run. If they run it into the ground, they run it into the ground.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Contest rules SEATTLE Here’s how to get in the running to win Joyce’s Bakery: Write an essay, 200 words or less, explaining why you want to own a neighborhood business, your own business, or this business. The essay must be in English and legible. Entries will be judged on content, clarity and originality, not grammar or spelling. Entries must be accompanied by $100 - a $90 entry fee and $10 nonrefundable handling fee. The entry fee will be refunded should the contest fail to generate enough interest to proceed. Applicants may enter as often as they wish but must pay the full entry fee each time. Deadline: March 31, 1998. Contest organizers reserve the right to extend the deadline up to 60 days. Barring extension, a winner should be announced by March 15. Entry forms are available at Joyce’s Bakery, 9400 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA, 98115. For more information call the contest hot line at (206) 524-1922.