Three Brothers Bakery has earned a reputation for baking goods that remind many Houstonians of home. There are Eastern European–style breads and pastries that trace their roots to Polish-Jewish traditions, and cookies, cupcakes, pies, and cakes of all kinds, fit for any sweet occasion. But the bakery’s 200-year history started long before its arrival in Houston.

It all began in 1825, when, in the same building where French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte once slept, Robert “Bobby” Jucker’s forebears launched a breadmaking business. His grandparents later inherited and operated it alongside their four children, including Jucker’s father, Sigmund. “The kids pretty much ran the bakery,” he says. Then, the Nazis came.

After turning themselves in, the family was separated and forced to work in concentration camps under dire circumstances. At the camp where Sigmund was held, he was in charge of waking everyone. After one incident of oversleeping, he was met with a cruel punishment from the Nazis, who forced him to roll in cold, wet mud. Refusing or fighting back meant death for someone in the camp. “That affected him so much that he never really could truly fall asleep again,” Jucker says.

Not long after, though, Sigmund woke to find the Nazis were gone. He freed himself from the camp’s gate with a pair of wire cutters and eventually reunited with his siblings. The three brothers took over a German bakery, where they began making bread again, but they had their sights set on moving to Colorado. Their sister, who had relocated to Houston, changed their minds once she told them the Texas city’s streets were “lined with gold.”

The brothers moved to Houston, where they took up work making white bread in a warehouse, but Houston’s heat made the conditions brutal_. Jucker recalls his father saying they’d lose six pounds of water weight each day from all the sweat. After some miserable shifts, the brothers decided to use their baking skills to open a business of their own.

On May 8, 1949, they opened the first Three Brothers Bakery on Holman Street in Downtown Houston. They soon realized that having only one parking space for the entire business wasn’t ideal. So six years later, they moved to a lot on Almeda Street at Southmore with more parking, which brought in more customers. Five years after that, they signed a 40-year lease in South Braeswood, reopening the bakery in an area known for its growing Jewish community. “That’s where I kind of grew up,” Jucker says.

For years, the three brothers made everything by hand. It was all they knew—in fact, they didn’t even buy a mixer or hire their first employee until 1963. Jucker joined the business 20 years later, though that wasn’t always initially his plan. Despite his land management degree, he had no luck finding a job within the oil field, and so when his family encouraged him to work at the bakery until he found a permanent gig, he obliged. “I’ve been there temporarily since 1983, so 42 years,” Jucker says.

In 2000, Jucker took over the bakery, and his wife, Janice, joined him five years later. Like many other restaurants, the bakery has weathered many storms—literally. In 2008, the Braeswood location was hit hard by Hurricane Ike, prompting a complete renovation. The bakery reopened two years later, making headlines when Country Living Magazine claimed it had the “Best Mail Order Pecan Pie America Has to Offer.” Intrigued, Houston Chronicle’s former food editor Greg Morago jokingly asked for a three-layered pie cake—a challenge Jucker accepted. He responded with his own creation—the Pumpecapple Pie, which would further cement Three Brothers Bakery’s place in national dessert fame. The complex, multilayered concoction, comprised of a pumpkin pie baked into a pumpkin spice cake, a pecan pie baked into a chocolate cake, and an apple pie baked into a spice cake, was featured on the Food Network and in programs like CBS Morning News and Good Morning America. “I had never seen anything like that in my life,” Jucker says.

The national hype has died down since then, but the local hype is alive and well. In 2012, the bakery expanded near Memorial on Kingsride Lane and has since opened two more locations, including one on Washington Avenue and another in Tanglewood. The bakery itself is still evolving.

Jucker says Three Brothers aims to keep up with the times. Fall is filled with Halloween-themed goodies decorated with spiders, googly eyes, and ghosts, plus pumpkin-flavored treats, including pies, cheesecakes, muffins, poundcakes, Danish, and even rugelach, traditional crescent-shaped Jewish pastries. Meanwhile, year-round, there are gingerbread cookies; Hamantaschen, a triangular cookie with several fillings like chocolate, cherry, lemon, and apricot; and just about every bread variation a Houstonian could want. 

While times have been challenging throughout the bakery’s 200-year history, Jucker says no disaster—not a hurricane, a fire, a global pandemic, or even the Holocaust—has been able to keep them down. He gets it from his family, who survived one of the most brutal events in history. “You cannot tell them, ‘You can’t do that.’ That’s not an option for them,” he says. It’s a lesson he holds close to him when running the business. “I think, because I’ve learned from that, Janice and I have become the king and queen of disasters,” he says.