At her new bakery, Jennifer Esposito makes gluten-free cookies using sorghum flour. (Anne Wermiel)
Jennifer Esposito is exhausted. The actress has been working 14-hour days on a new passion project, and, she notes, one of her eyes is a bit puffy.
“It’s been a rough couple days,” she says wearily with a touch of a Brooklyn accent.
But it’s not an intense indie film or new TV show that’s beating the 39-year-old down. It’s a tiny gluten-free bakery in the East Village.
Earlier this month, the former star of CBS’s “Blue Bloods” opened Jennifer’s Way at 263 E. 10th St. She’s been hard at work baking gluten-free goods in small batches, and even mops the floors.
So, what is the ex-wife of Bradley Cooper doing slaving away in the kitchen making vegan chocolate-chip cookies and quinoa bread?
The surprising turn of events began four years ago when Esposito was diagnosed with celiac disease, an autoimmune condition where consuming gluten, which is found in wheat and many grains, adversely affects the intestines and the body’s ability to absorb nutrients.
“It’s a roller coaster. I still have the problems with hair falling out, eyelashes falling out, exhaustion,” laments Esposito. “It’s not a joy ride — you manage, but you have to be diligent.”
She hit a low point in October, when she collapsed on set and CBS said it “regretfully had to put her character on a leave of absence.”
Esposito lashed out at the network, saying CBS had failed to obey her doctor’s orders to reduce her schedule because of her disease.
She ranted on Twitter that CBS “implied that I was NOT truly ill and this was a scheme to get a raise!”
In January, it was reported that it was unlikely she would return to the show, and two new female characters have been brought on to replace Esposito’s character.
The ordeal pushed her to open the bakery, something she’d dreamed about for years. With its chalkboard wall, distressed wood table and antique lighting fixtures, it looks, at first glance, like just another precious downtown bakery. But it soon becomes apparent that it’s not all just cookies and cupcakes and cute décor.
There’s a sense of militant anti-gluten fervor that pervades the quaint space. All of her baked goods are gluten-free, dairy-free, refined-sugar-free and peanut-free. Many items are also vegan.
“This area really wants vegan, so 90 percent of my stuff is,” says Esposito, though she herself eats meat. (“There’s so many things that I can’t eat. I can’t eliminate that too. I’ll be dead.”)
There are T-shirts for sale bearing slogans like, “Team Celiac” and “Celiac can kiss my gluten-free muffin.” Treats are packaged with stickers bearing warnings like “Did you know gluten is in most cold cuts?” A shelf by the window is stocked with copies of an article headlined “Leaky Gut and Autoimmune Diseases.”
“I want for it to be an information center,” says Esposito, a self-taught baker who can be typically found in the back of the shop taking out a tray of artisan yeast-free bread or instructing an employee on how to frost the cupcakes.
But as soon as a customer can be heard talking of a doctor failing to diagnose someone, she pops upfront for a chat.
Rick Byrd, 56, a friend of the actress, who was recently manning the cash register, tells of how Esposito’s boyfriend, model Louis Dowler, recently came in with a sandwich from another shop and was made to leave, lest his lunch contaminate the space.
“We don’t even allow gluten on the premise,” says Byrd, who is severely gluten-intolerant himself. “It’s a safe zone.”
Byrd’s husband, Patrick M. Fratellone, is an integrative physician whom Esposito goes to twice weekly for intravenous vitamins. A stack of his cards lies on the bakery counter for customers to take. “He’s like Jesus Christ,” Esposito enthuses.
The sandwich incident notwithstanding, Esposito notes that Dowler, a former businessman, has been extremely supportive of her new venture, both emotionally and financially. “If it wasn’t for him, this place wouldn’t exist,” she says.
And Esposito’s educational endeavors aren’t limited to the confines of the shop. She’s set to appear on a few episodes of “Playing With Fire,” a new restaurant-industry reality show on E!, and she’s shot a pilot for her own reality show focused on her gluten-free travails that she hopes will get picked up.
But, for all her fervor, Esposito is not a fan of how trendy going gluten-free has become, arguing that it’s led to false-labeling, a big danger for those who, like herself and Byrd, are very intolerant.
“It really upsets me,” she says. “It’s becoming a real money-maker. Everybody is putting a ‘gluten-free’ muffin in their place — it’s not safe.”