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The starter that opened this shop nine years ago still gets fed twice a day.
Same building on Kelly Road since the doors opened. Seven people run the ovens, the bench and the counter, and the culture in the bread hasn't changed once.
The shop has run out of the same building for nine years. Nothing about the address has changed and neither has the split in the business: a custom side that books cakes and trays against a calendar, and a hearth side that sells whatever came out of the oven that morning to whoever walks in.
Seven people keep both sides running. Two decorators handle every cake and cookie tray that leaves the building. Three bakers rotate the oven and the bench across the week, because nobody bakes bread alone for nine years without a rotation. One counter lead runs the front of house — the register, the case, the four stools. And the owner still opens the shop five mornings a week, which means the person who started this place is still the first one in most days, not a name on a wall.
None of that is a story we tell for its own sake. It's the reason a standing weekly bread order gets the same loaf every week and a wedding tasting gets the same two decorators every time — the crew is small enough that consistency isn't a policy, it's just who shows up.
Not named individuals — roles, because the tasting you book or the loaf you buy is with whoever is rotated onto that station that day.
- 2 Decorators Every wedding tier, celebration cake and cookie tray passes through one of these two. Buttercream is mixed in-house from butter, sugar and egg whites — no shortening, no whipped topping.
- 3 Bakers, oven & bench Rotate across the sourdough bench, the lamination schedule and the Rofco B40 through the week. No single baker owns one product line permanently.
- 1 Counter lead Runs the register, the case and the four stools out front. First point of contact for anyone walking in without an appointment.
- 1 Owner Opens the shop five mornings a week and still works the bench when the schedule needs it.
Every loaf of sourdough that leaves this building traces back to the same culture the shop opened with nine years ago. It gets fed twice a day, seven days a week, including the days the shop is closed — a starter doesn't take Mondays off just because the counter does.
We don't sell starter, don't teach a starter class, and don't have a side business selling jars of it to people who want to bake at home. It exists for one reason: to leaven the bread that goes out the door here. Hydration and proof time shift week to week with the weather and the flour lot, which is also why dough proofs for 18 to 36 hours rather than a number fixed on a wall chart.
The starter is nine years old and gets fed twice a day, seven days a week.
The oven is a Rofco B40, a stone-deck oven built to bake from the bottom up rather than blow hot air around a cabinet. It holds four sheet pans at a time and takes about forty minutes to come up to full heat, which is why it gets lit well before the first loaves go in.
Loading it is a hand job. A long-handled peel slides each pan onto the stone deck, one at a time, and pulling a load out early or late by even a few minutes changes the crust. There's no digital proofing box hooked to the oven and no plan to add one — a baker who's rotated onto that station reads the dough and the deck, not a screen.
Four pans per load is a hard ceiling. It's why the sourdough bench and the lamination schedule are staggered through the week instead of stacked on the same morning — the oven can only hold what it can hold, and pushing more through it just means a worse bake for everything in that load.
What the crew bakes
Sourdough, laminated pastry and pie orders off this same oven are laid out on Bakery & Café. Wedding tiers, celebration cakes and cookie trays, along with the tasting-and-deposit process, are on Custom Cakes.