When Christine Moore followed her Yalie boyfriend to California, she walked off the plane, felt the sunshine, so unlike the dreary East Coast weather she left behind, and decided never to go back.
She spent the rest of her life in Southern California, ending up in Altadena, where she lived, and Pasadena, where her popular cafe and bakery, Little Flower, serves breakfast and lunch seven days a week. She would also write cookbooks, make iconic caramels and marshmallows, and, with her now-closed restaurant Lincoln, jump-start the renewal of a block at the border of Pasadena and Altadena that today boasts a lively food scene.
Moore died at the age of 62 on Jan. 4 after suffering a heart attack. She is survived by her three children, Maddie, 26, Avery, 24, and Colin, 18.
Born on Nov. 6, 1963, she grew up in Maplewood, N.J. She began her working life as a waitress, then a restaurant manager and a caterer until, to fulfill a childhood dream, she took a few extension classes in baking. A tragedy in her late 20s sparked her ambition: After her best friend died in a car crash, she realized how tenuous life was, and with scant savings, she flew to Paris. Living on bread, butter and fruit, she became a stagier or unpaid apprentice at the bakery of Gerard Mulot, a master pâtissier, boulanger and chocolatier.
Returning to California, Moore soon found her way into the pastry kitchen at Campanile, the L.A. restaurant opened in 1989 by the chefs Nancy Silverton and the late Mark Peel. While there, she joined a women’s dinner club that read cookbooks and made the recipes. Several of those women became lifelong friends, including the chef and photographer Staci Valentine, and Campanile’s then-shop manager, food writer Teri Gelber.
“Christine was so fun, always laughing,” Gelber said. “She wore her heart on her sleeve. She left Campanile to work at Les Deux Cafés with chef David Wynns. I was over there a lot. That’s where she once made asparagus ice cream, which [restaurant critic] Jonathan Gold teased her about for years!”
Moore worked at Les Deux Cafés until she was about to give birth to her first child. Wynns threw her a baby shower that was a cookie exchange. Many of the city’s foremost bakers — including Sherry Yard, Nancy Silverton, Sumi Chang — brought cookies to share. It was a sign of the affection Moore inspired among her colleagues.
At home with her newborn, Moore grew restless and began making candy; specifically, sea-salt caramels like the ones she’d loved in Paris, and vanilla marshmallows. She borrowed the kitchen of chef and radio host Evan Kleiman and worked there at night. She sold the candies, beautifully bagged, at farmers markets.
“I remember her hand-wrapping those damn caramels, with her baby crawling around on the floor,” said Gelber.
“The first time we interviewed Christine on KCRW’s ‘Good Food,’ her daughter Maddie was on her lap, teething on a spatula,” said Jennifer Ferro, the president of KCRW. Moore and Ferro had babies a year apart and became parenting support partners.
“Christine became my entrepreneurial whisperer,” Ferro said. “She was such a risk-taker, constantly planning things, going for broke. I loved having her in my ear, pushing me along. She was such a relentless optimist about people.
“I was getting married in Hawaii in 2007 and Christine, who had a baby and a new cafe, insisted on coming. And making the cake … She arrived with the frozen cake layers in her suitcase. Holding three-month-old Colin under one arm, she frosted and decorated the cake.”
Writer Victoria Patterson worked at Julienne in San Marino where Moore was a pastry chef before opening Little Flower. “She had a booming laugh,” Patterson said. “Everybody loved her. She had a grand, almost startling personality. Very rare.”
“She followed her heart,” says Gelber. “Nothing scared her off.”
Indeed. In 2007, with three young children and a crumbling marriage, she opened her dream bakery/cafe, Little Flower in Pasadena.
“A tiny café on the edge of town, it’s where we gather to prepare and eat fresh, delicious food, drink strong coffee,” she wrote in her first cookbook, “Little Flower: Recipes from the Café.”
“Working with Christine was one of the most intensely personal experiences I’ve had as an editor,” says Colleen Dunn Bates, who published the cookbook in 2012. “She had a very strong vision of how things should look. Yet she struggled with being a writer. She read her introduction to me just sobbing, convinced it was terrible. In fact, she was a great storyteller and a better writer than many cooks.”
Bates and Moore remained close friends. “She was a very emotional person in many of the best ways. She told me she cried every day. She cared so much. Everybody was friends with her.”
Christine’s second book, the stunning “Little Flower Baking” (2016), had a bigger budget and a whole team, including her pastry chef Cecilia Leung and Valentine, who took the photographs. Ten years on, the book is still selling.
In 2015, Christine opened her second cafe, Lincoln, near border of Altadena and Pasadena. In the large vaulting space of a former steel fabricator, she created an open kitchen, a large seating area and, outside, a patio.
Although popular — often with long lines out the door — Lincoln, like so many other restaurants, did not survive the pandemic. But it did set off the cluster of lively food spots there today, including Ferrazzani’s Pasta & Market and branches of Kismet Rotisserie, Stumptown Coffee and Home State, which occupies the space that was once Lincoln.
“When things didn’t work out, Christine held her head high and moved on,” says Valentine. “She was always planning her next adventure.”
“Christine was constantly learning and expanding and trying things,” added Valentine. “She inspired everyone.”
Moore was all about community. She held book launches for novelists and cookbook writers — and once offered to do so for this writer.
“She was close to a lot of little girls in our neighborhood,” Avery said. “They called her their Fairy Godmother.”
“And she took note of all the kids around who were going off to college,” said Maddie. “And she sent them Little Flower care packages — a T-shirt, a backpack, cookies, caramels, marshmallows. She knew what it was like to be alone for the first time, so they’d get this beautiful box from their Fairy Godmother.”
A year ago, when the fires struck Altadena, Moore and her son, Colin, slipped past police lines to return to their home with garden hoses. They fought off flames and embers to save it and several other structures.
“It was very traumatic,” said Colin. “A front-row seat to all the horror. It took a toll on Mom’s mental health. She struggled.”
The house survived, but Moore had not yet moved back home.
As a businesswoman, a single mother and a highly sensitive human, Moore made it through life thanks to a surfeit of loving kindness.
“Mom was a very public-facing person,” said Avery, “but we got to see her behind closed doors: the tender, loving, generous, sparkling lady she always was and will always be.”
“We knew her as our Mom, our best friend, our haven, our person,” Maddie said.
“Being raised by a single parent, it could go either way,” added Avery. “But she really doubled down, she never looked back, she sent us to amazing schools and never complained. Not an easy road, but she just did it, did it with such ease and grace and so fiercely loved us. She was the giving tree, is the giving tree. She instilled that in every person she met.”
Two nights after Moore died, her good friends and children sat around the table and talked. They said their mom and friend was the person you always called, who gave the best advice, who you wanted in you corner — and she always was in your corner. Every person there said that Christine was their best friend.
“She just had this spark every time she walked into the room,” said Colin.
And her hugs were famous. “She gives you a hug and in short order,” Bates said, “you are talking on a really deep topic.”
On hearing that line, Moore’s daughter Avery laughed and said, “She was so not surface level: no small talk, it was always straight to the meat!
“My mom was so unapologetically herself,” Avery continued. “No matter the situation, she trusted her guts and her instincts … I feel like being raised by a force of nature will be the greatest gift of our life.”
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