The Queen of Carrot Cake was One Tough Cookie

This article is a tribute to my friend, Rene Mancino, owner of CARROT TOP Bakery on Broadway in Upper Manhattan. Rene died this past year as a victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound....inside the business in her office. As her husband, friends and customers mourn her, I remembered that I had written this article years ago for a local New York publication and thought (as a tribute to her memory) it might be a good idea to post pieces of the interview.

As a child, the only times Renee Allen Mancino was sure to be at her Cleveland, Ohio home was when her mother was baking.
A self-described little hellion for most of her childhood, constantly at odds with her mother and six siblings and eluding her grandmother's strap, a sweet tooth for her mother's chocolate fudge, breakfast rings, cakes, pies and cookies was her only taming influence.
The memory of these occasions may have ultimately saved Mancino's life, and was the genesis of her thriving CARROT TOP restaurants, and what NY Times food critic Molly O'Neill described as the "best carrot cake in the world."
"O'Neill had heard about my cake and came here for the recipe," Mancino recounted. "In order to get in the food editor's section of the Times, you give them a good recipe, she tests it and if she likes it, they print it."

Not only did O'Neill print her carrot cake recipe in her column, but Mancino graces the cover of a cookbook O'Neill authored entitled "New York Cookbook" a compilation and history of current and legendary New York recipes which includes Le Cirque's spaghetti primavera, Lindy's cheesecake and Sylvia's barbecue ribs.
"I was honored to be selected for the book because New York food is so unique. Tourists come from all over the world to sample the different dishes here. I've gotten calls from all over the United States."

CARROT TOP's two bakery/restaurants employ 20 and their state-of-the-art ovens from Paris turn out over 150 cakes and pastries. Baking begins at 3am. Cakes have been shipped all over the country to such celebrities as Oprah, Stevie Wonder, various movie actors & rock stars and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Rene's story is the stuff of a good movie-of-the-week.  After her mother's and grandmother's "good Christian efforts" failed to keep her at home and out of trouble, at 14 she was sentenced to a year's residency in reform school for truancy. "I went in that school a tough juvenile delinquent and came out a straight-A student," she remembers.
Educated during the early 60's when integration and busing laws were being enacted, Mancino took advantage of every opportunity that came her way. At 16, she became one of NASA's youngest employees, rising at 5am and travelling two hours to her job in a Cleveland suburb. She received a scholorship to Howard University in Washington D.C. to study forensic medicine, but instead moved to New York and began an internship at St. Luke's Hospital morgue. She became a Black Muslim, married badly ("and dangerously" she adds) and within two years found herself a widow with a baby girl to support.
A Muslim minister asked her to bake a cake and liked it so much that he passed her name to the Muslim inmate population. She began baking and selling carrot cakes to pay for her daughter's tuition and within a year she was baking 1,200 cakes a week.
"I began baking under the name CARROT TOP with $200 of my rent money. When I wasn't baking, I was travelling downtown taking cake and pastry samples to restaurants. Balducci's was one of my first commercial accounts."
In 1977 after 4 years of baking in her apartment, she received a scholarship to Columbia University's medical school. Instead of attending medical school, she met Robert Mancino, a New York City police officer at the 34th precinct in Washington Heights. "He was the first man who believed in me," she said. "He bought me a mixer!" Two years later the couple were married. While he was on patrol, he found her a place for a store at Broadway & 214th Street and CARROT TOP BAKERY hit the street.
In 1983, they leased an additional space at 165th St where Robert introduced entrees and sandwiches and additional menu items.
The success of the CARROT TOP restaurants and bakery comes despite much advice to the contrary and legal battles with landlords, the telephone company but kept pressing ahead to make the business a success.
In an impish understatement, the Queen of Carrot Cake said that despite the ups and downs of life and running a business, "I do know what a good cake is supposed to taste like."