At high noon on the first day of spring 2025, the cozy, elegant interior of Old Europe Pastries is bathed in sunlight shining through the front windows that frame an exterior view of pedestrians on a busy sidewalk. The 30-year-old bakery is on the Broadway side of downtown Asheville’s main artery, but could be on a little street in France, Italy, Switzerland…. or Hungary – the birthplace of owner, baker, and visionary Melinda Vetro.

Raised in a communist country, Melinda says she could never have dreamed that one day she would not only have her own successful business, one of Foodtopia’s most popular culinary destinations, but also own the two-story brick building it operates from. “A girl who started pastry school at 14!” Melinda says with an incredulous smile.

Growing up in Hungary, traditional education was completed in grade 8, then students were required to choose their vocation; “No pressure!”.

Pastry was something she was familiar with. “I used to bake with my grandma, everyone baked at home where I lived.”

For the next three years, she was in pastry school a week, then worked in a bakery a week, a routine on repeat until she received her certification at 17 years old. “I enjoyed it, but there was no money in it, so instead I worked three different server jobs – in a beer pub, a night club and a coffee shop. Tips were where the money was.”

It was also where she met her future husband, a political refugee who returned to Hungary from the US after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989. In 1991, she emigrated to America, joining him in St. Paul, Minnesota. She didn’t know English and could not work in the US on her visa, so to relieve her boredom, she made and decorated cakes.

It was a eureka moment for Zoltan Vetro, who determined they needed to open a coffee shop and bakery. The couple – now married – did not want to stay in Minnesota so with $20,000 savings, traveled the country seeking a place to live and start a business. Charlotte seemed promising, but a business consultant there discouraged them.

On their way back to Minnesota, they decided to see where Last of the Mohicans had been filmed. “We got the first sight of the mountains and Zoltan said, ‘This is where we will live!’”

Back in St. Paul for six months, they saved more money, packed their things, and in 1994, moved into a cheap rental home in West Asheville. They both got jobs at Pizza Hut, he as a driver and she as a server. “I was the worst server,” she admits with a laugh. “I still didn’t speak English well and couldn’t figure out the toppings people wanted. Front of house was not for me!”

Thankfully, within a few months, they found a small available space on Weaverville Road in Woodfin and used their savings to sign the lease and purchase equipment.

Old Europe Pastries opened in December 1994; it was not exactly an overnight success. “I wasn’t making the things people here wanted – muffins, pies and brownies. No one was looking for European style cakes or strudel.” Weaverville Road was not pedestrian friendly and the gritty shopping center they were in was not attracting people to their business model.

They quickly realized they needed to be in downtown Asheville and Zoltan found a recently vacated storefront in the iconic Flat Iron building. It was not big enough for a kitchen, but they hung their Old Europe Pastries sign over the door at 18 Battery Park and added coffee to their pastry menu; they kept the Woodfin space for baking. “’Early every morning I would go to Woodfin, bake, then put everything in boxes and drive downtown,” Melinda recalls.

Business was still slow; expecting a child, the couple contemplated moving to a larger, more cosmopolitan city in the northeast. Shortly after the birth of baby boy Bence, they had an idea. “Every town in Europe has sidewalk cafes,” she says. “We convinced the city to let us pour concrete over two parking spaces next to a fire hydrant. We put out eight marble tables and chairs and people loved it. We got a liquor license so we could make coffee drinks with liqueurs.”

Business took off, so much so that when the Flat Iron re-claimed their space, the couple purchased one floor of a building on Lexington and moved Old Europe there in 2006. Three years later, in 2009, they were among the many business closures caused by the 2008 recession.

Newly divorced, single mother Melinda got a job cooking in a retirement home, where she immediately realized she would not make enough money to support her and Bence. “I didn’t know how, but I knew I had to re-open Old Europe.”

With help from former customers, friends and acquaintances – but no banks, she notes – and a contractor who agreed to build out the tiny commercial slot at 13 Broadway for just $5,000, Old Europe Pastries was back in business on Friday, October 13th, 2010.

From the get-go, customers flocked to the new store, so much so that after 18 months solo, Melinda hired help and stayed open seven days a week. She started selling wedding cakes, though she did not make them. “I don’t have the patience to spend 10 hours on one cake!” They added breakfast items like sweet and savory croissants, quiche, muffins and gluten-free baked goods.

During Covid, they closed the dining area but continued baking, filling to-go orders for long lines of mostly local customers. “We doubled our business. People wanted their croissants, their coffee, their cake. They just needed normalcy.”

That landlord let her know in 2020 that she would need to vacate by December 31, 2022; friends urged her to buy the building for sale across the street. “It had never crossed my mind that I could own a building, but we needed a home, so after six months of gathering documents and filling out a million pages of paperwork and putting in my application for a loan, I was approved. For a very big number!”

She hired the same firm – Falcon Construction – she used for the 600’ square ft. building at 13 Broadway to renovate and transform the 2,000 sq. ft. main level of 18 Broadway (she has since added a production kitchen in the basement and will eventually turn the second floor into an event space).

She spent Christmas day 2022 rolling carts of supplies across Broadway and on December 30, 2022 at 2pm opened the fifth – and final – location of Old Europe Pastries.

“People say we are lucky to find this building beside the AC Hotel,” she says with a smile. “The AC opened in 2017. We have been in Asheville for 30 years. I think the hotels are lucky that the little, local businesses here turned Asheville from a sleepy little town to a place people want to visit and big fancy hotels can succeed. Who’s lucky? They’re lucky!”

More on Old Europe Pastries.

Written by Kay West