McKenzie's Bakery: A Cultural History of a New Orleans Institution
Written by: Edward DesRoches
For most of the twentieth century, a box tied with string from McKenzie's Pastry Shoppes was as much a fixture of New Orleans life as a po-boy or a second-line parade. The bakery closed its doors permanently in 2000, and yet its name refuses to disappear from the city's vocabulary — turning up on king cakes every Carnival season, on vintage t-shirts, and now on a museum wall. Its story says as much about how New Orleans holds onto its institutions as it does about pastry.
Accounts differ slightly on the exact founding year — some place it in the 1920s, others in 1929, and a widely cited version puts the sale in 1936, when Donald Entringer Sr. bought a bakery from Henry McKenzie on Prytania Street for a modest sum. Whatever the precise date, the pattern is consistent: Henry McKenzie started a small Uptown bakery, and financial hardship — the Great Depression is often cited as a factor — pushed it into new hands. Entringer kept McKenzie's name on the door, a decision that would prove more durable than almost anything else about the business. Under his stewardship the bakery expanded dramatically, eventually growing into a local chain of more than 50 Pastry Shoppes scattered across the city, each one selling the same lineup of blackout cake, jelly rolls, doughnuts, and the item most New Orleanians will mention first: the buttermilk drop.
McKenzie's single most consequential contribution to New Orleans culture had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with a marketing accident. By the mid-twentieth century, king cake — the ring-shaped, sugar-topped pastry eaten throughout Carnival season — was already a fixture of the city's bakeries, McKenzie's included. Traditionally, a bean or a small trinket was baked inside, and whoever's slice contained it was crowned king or queen for the party.
The story of how that trinket became a baby is told slightly differently across sources, but the throughline holds: a traveling salesman visited Entringer's bakery with a surplus of tiny dolls he couldn't unload elsewhere. Some tellings say they were French porcelain figures known as "Frozen Charlottes," a nod to the era's small china novelties; others describe cheaper plastic babies bought in the French Quarter after the porcelain ran out. Entringer himself later recalled using porcelain dolls from a cake-ornament salesman with unsold stock dating back to the late 1930s, with most bakeries switching to cheaper plastic versions after World War II. Whichever version is most accurate, the outcome is not in dispute: McKenzie's is widely credited as the bakery that put a baby figurine into the New Orleans king cake for the first time, a practice that spread to essentially every bakery in the region and eventually beyond it. Today, finding the baby in your slice is one of the most recognizable rituals of Louisiana Carnival culture, and it traces directly back to a chance encounter at a McKenzie's counter.
The Entringer family's imprint on New Orleans food culture didn't stop at McKenzie's. The same family also built McKenzie's Chicken-In-A-Box, a fried chicken offshoot that ran for roughly half a century before Hurricane Katrina and, according to local reporting, kept operating out of an old bake shop in Gentilly even after the original bakery chain shut down. There's also a well-known bit of only-in-New-Orleans culinary trivia connecting McKenzie's to another beloved local brand: Al Copeland, founder of Popeyes, is said to have worked at his brother's bakery business while he was developing his own fried chicken recipes — a small, tangled thread linking several of the city's most nostalgic food names to the same kitchens.
By the late twentieth century, McKenzie's had grown too large for its own foundations. The chain went through bankruptcy, changed hands among new owners, and finally closed for good around 2000–2001. For a city that measures institutions in generations rather than years, the loss registered as more than the closure of a business — it read as the end of a shared childhood memory. Locals remember McKenzie's above all for its king cakes, and for being the bakery that first put babies in them instead of beans.
What happened next is its own small chapter in New Orleans commercial folklore. After McKenzie's finally closed, Tastee Donuts — a longtime rival chain — bought the rights to McKenzie's recipes and logo. During Carnival season, it became common to see Tastee locations advertising "real McKenzie's king cakes," keeping the name alive in a limited, seasonal way for over a decade. Then, more than a decade after the bakery's closure, the McKenzie's sign reappeared at its old address on Harrison Avenue in Lakeview, this time as a Tastee Donuts franchise using the original McKenzie's recipes for favorites like buttermilk drops, jelly rolls, and turtles. For longtime residents, the sign's return wasn't just a logo license — it was a resurrection of a specific corner of the city's memory.
The bakery's physical trace lives on elsewhere, too. A stretch of McKenzie's history has been preserved for public memory in a more literal sense: an original McKenzie's sign was donated to a New Orleans museum, where it now stands as part of a gallery devoted to the city's culinary and heritage signage. Museum staff have described hoping the lit sign will do exactly what the Tastee franchise's counter does — trigger the specific, sugary nostalgia that generations of New Orleanians still associate with the name.
McKenzie's never survived as a company in any conventional sense — no publicly traded successor, no national expansion, no modern reinvention as a boutique bakery brand. What survived instead is stranger and, in its way, more telling of how New Orleans treats its institutions: a rival bought the recipes, a sign ended up in a museum, and an entire regional tradition — the baby in the king cake — outgrew the business that started it. McKenzie's is less a bakery now than a piece of civic memory, invoked every Carnival season by people slicing into a cake and checking their piece for a small plastic figure, most of whom have never set foot in a McKenzie's Pastry Shoppe and never will.
"4 New Orleans Traditions We'll Never Forget." Livery Tours, 25 Nov. 2014."Historic McKenzie's Sign Moves to New Orleans Museum." WGNO, 9 Jan. 2024."The History and Evolution of King Cakes." Google Arts & Culture, Southern Food and Beverage Museum, artsandculture, Accessed 18 Sept. 2026."How King Cake Became a Mardi Gras Icon." Chowhound, Accessed 18 Sept. 2026."Is That a Plastic Baby Jesus in My Cake?" WAMC, 17 Feb. 2012."Keeping the McKenzie's Name Alive." WWNO, 29 July 2010."McKenzie's Pastry Shoppes." American Retro Apparel, Accessed 18 Sept. 2026."Oh Baby: The History behind This King Cake Tradition." KTBS, Accessed 18 Sept. 2026."Tastee / McKenzie's, New Orleans, LA Report #790." Blaine Restaurant Report, 29 Dec. 2024."What Is King Cake?" The Daily Meal, Accessed 18 Sept. 2026."Why There Are Babies in King Cake and What It Really Means If You Get One." Tasting Table, Accessed 18 Sept. 2026.