Working the graveyard with the folks who don’t sleep.

*^*The Walking Zombie

In the kitchen of Monterey’s Paris Bakery, owner and chef Jackie Jegat moves like a character on a DVD that is being fast-forwarded. While local “R&B and old school” station KOCN plays on the radio, Jegat quickly separates and lays out metal baking pans as fast as a Vegas dealer would throw out a deck of cards.

He takes spoonfuls of an almond paste from a plastic container and plops them one by one on a baking pan. Jegat then mashes the goo on the pan with a metal fork. These little clusters will become the bakery’s tasty almond tuile cookies.

Jegat is only a couple hours into a shift that stretches from 9pm to 6am. He plans to keep this frantic pace through the whole evening, helped by assistant Greg Dangio and watched by wife and bakery co-owner Sonja Jegat. Jackie, who is a short bearish man with white hair and a white beard, tells me what keeps him going late at night in his strong French accent. “We have the work to be done,” he says. “The work keeps us busy.”

Meanwhile, Sonja confides to me that her husband’s late-night hours take their toll. She thinks the lack of sleep—Jegat only gets about four or five hours of rest in the morning—might have contributed to his recent diagnosis of diabetes. Also, staying up all night definitely cuts down on his energy levels during the day. “Don’t ask him about daytime,” she says. “He’s a walking zombie.”

Jegat says there are two reasons why he works late night. One is that he enjoys making bread and croissants that his customers can buy fresh every morning. Also, he likes the fact that he doesn’t have to deal with crowds. “I’m not a person people,” he says.