By Meryle Evans
Creating New Roles and Recognition for Pastry Chefs
While some acclaimed pastry virtuosos are plunging into solo ventures, another recent trend has emerged: restaurants establishing bakeries of their own. They are offering pastry chefs and bakers new roles and recognition creating desserts for the dining room and expanding their management skills running a retail operation. It’s happening in other cities as well, but is particularly noticeable in New York, where, since the pandemic, more than a dozen top-notch restaurants are welcoming enthusiastic customers to their sibling outlets and seeing lines out the door. Some are on the premises; others are stand-alone brick and mortar – across the street, down the block or miles away. Many double as all-day cafes serving sandwiches, light fare and beverages; others transform in the evening into a wine bar or a chef’s counter.
“It’s really been amazing” says Michelle Palazzo, Director of Pastry Operations for the Frenchette group of New York restaurants, reflecting on the post-Covid proliferation of bakeries around the city. Frenchette was among the first to take the leap. When Palazzo joined owner/chefs Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr to open the Tribeca bistro in 2018, star baker Roger Gural of nearby Arcade Bakery supplied their bread. When Gural decided to retire two years later, Palazzo recalls, “it kind of made sense to take it over during Covid, people were wanting or needing bakeries; this was your source of human interaction.”
As the bakery flourished, supplying the restaurant and serving the community, Palazzo’s responsibilities expanded to include heading the bread and dessert programs for the group’s new ventures, Le Rock in Rockefeller Center in 2022; Frenchette Café and Frenchette Bakery at the Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking District in 2023; and Le Veau d’Or in midtown in 2024. A large up-to-date kitchen at the Whitney bakery makes it possible to provide bread, pastries and desserts for all their restaurants, as well as for wholesale customers and other restaurants. With a staff of 25, Palazzo, a graduate in pastry and restaurant management from the Institute of Culinary Education, juggles generating ideas for four menus with managing the bakeries.
“It’s a lot easier at the Whitney,” Palazzo says. “If I need 50 or 65 baguettes for a private event, or I want the puff pastry a certain way, I can tell my head baker this is what I want. It’s very much a collaborative effort and it’s challenging for sure. Once or twice a week I go to each location in the morning just to see that everyone feels supported and they have all the resources they need; we all rely on each other.”
While the bakery at Frenchette was a serendipitous opportunity, Thea bakery was always in the plans for Theodora, the 76- seat Brooklyn restaurant that partners Tomer Blechman and Gerardo Estevez opened last February. They brought Christina Kavalis, a Johnson & Wales graduate, on board to develop the bakery program when, as Kavalis recalls, “It was a bare bones space and I had to work out of the restaurant for months until it was ready in August.” In the meantime, she helped design Theodora’s dessert program and now handles both operations. “I have a very trustworthy team of two” Kavalis explains. “One preps all the bread and desserts at the bakery and transports them to the restaurant (two doors away) where the team member who handles the dinner service finishes everything off.”
Kavalis’ menus reflect a close collaboration with the partners; Blechman; originally from Israel, and well known for nearby Miss Ada; and Estevez, with a Mexican background, while Kavalis helmed a business during Covid selling sweets that paid homage to her Greek roots. “It was a highly anticipated opening. I don’t think we knew what to expect, but the community has really shown up,” she says. “We just kind of went into it, but we knew what we wanted – classics, but with a very special twist.” Kavalis sells loaf cakes, such as tahini and banana, and pistachio and blueberry, by the slice. She also serves a coffee concha, babkas — chocolate chili, cinnamon and walnut — and a twice-baked croissant with shredded filo and Greek pastry cream. “The challenge for me,” she concludes, “has been trying to keep up with the demand.”
Several other community-focused restaurant bakeries made their debut in Brooklyn last year. Redwood Hospitality’s Laurel Bakery near the Brooklyn waterfront is from the team that operates the borough’s Place des Fetes, Café Mado and the soon to be reopened Michelin-starred Oxalis with veteran baker Craig Escalante turning out artisan breads, classic French and Italian pastries, sweet and savory, including an escargot in croissant dough brushed with ramps and Cantal cheese and rolled like a snail.
Pan Pan Vino Vino, an offspring of restaurant Nura in Greenpoint, is a bakery by day and a wine bar at night. Channeling her own and the area’s Polish roots, pastry chef Samantha Short bakes loaves of caraway rye and other Eastern European specialties, along with items from other cultures like a guava bun and sesame chocolate chip cookie. Near the Barclay Center, Sofreh Café, across the street from Nasim Alikhani’s Iranian restaurant Sofreh, is perfumed with the aroma of cardamom cake with rose and other Persian sweets.
Back in Manhattan, the Japanese bakery Postcard, adjacent to hand-roll bar Nami Nori in the West Village, is offering a colorful array of gluten-free breads and pastries. Taki Sakaeda, one of the restaurant’s three partners, all of whom met working at three- Michelin-starred Masa, does the baking: raspberry mochi doughnuts, miso shortbread, and sweet and savory sandos on bread that took six months of R & D to develop.
While many restaurants opt for stand- alone bakeries; others choose an in-house boutique, following in the footsteps of the iconic Balthazar, which has been selling baked goods to customers since 1997, and Lafayette, renowned for its round croissant, the Supreme.
A bakery was built into the concept at Greywind in Hudson Yards, a 2023 addition to Chef Dan Kluger’s roster of restaurants highlighting seasonal local ingredients. By day, pastry chef Jake Novick-Finder lures shoppers with an array of baked goods, grab-and-go options and pre-packaged ingredients; in the evening the space transforms into a chef’s counter overlooking the kitchen.
For Camari Mick, executive pastry chef and partner at Raf’s, a French-Italian bakery and casual restaurant in Noho that also opened in 2023, including a bakery “was a no brainer” because the previous tenants from an old- time bakery had left behind all of their kitchen equipment. Mick, who holds the same title at the Michelin-starred fine dining Musket Room a few blocks away, was profiled in the fall ‘22 issue of Pastry Arts, tracing her career path from culinary school to work at prestigious restaurants and a stint selling donuts on Instagram during Covid. The donuts caught the eye of Musket’s owners and landed her a job and subsequently accolades for her desserts. A Beard Awards nominee, Mick was also honored last year as one of Forbes 30 Under 30, and along with executive chef and partner Mary Attea, named a Food & Wine’s Best New Chef in 2024.
Mick was involved in the development of Raf’s from the very beginning, collaborating with Attea, to craft, as Food & Wine wrote, “a menu that bounces between France and Italy in a whirling decadence…” like a classic opera cake fused with tiramisu and a Prosciutto and Taleggio Croissant. Managing a staff of 14 with separate crews for each establishment, Mick has no set routine for splitting her time. “If I’m clocked in,” she says, “I’m available to anyone who needs me. It’s a challenge, but the rewards as a pastry chef and manager are seeing my cooks blossom into talented chefs and helping them see their own creations come alive.”
Renata Ameni, executive pastry chef at Kent Hospitality’s two Michelin-starred restaurants, Crown Shy and Saga in downtown Manhattan, and the new Flatiron seafood restaurant, Time and Tide, will soon add two bakeries to her responsibilities: Birdee, (for the name Ameni’s mother called her when she was little), a 3000-square-foot, stand-alone space in the newly renovated Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn, and Baby Birdee, tucked into Time and Tide, both slated to open this spring.
Originally from Brazil, Ameni is a veteran of top-tier establishments from Manresa in Northern California to New York’s iconic Eleven Madison Park, and one of eight chefs named a Fortune MPW (most powerful women) in 2023. “I’ve been working in restaurants a long time and wanted to focus a little bit more on the baking side,” she says, “and I love making ice cream.” Ameni and James Kent, the group’s owner/chef who passed away unexpectedly last year, made plans to open a small bakery inside the new restaurant. However, when the developers at Domino reached out, the pair agreed to sign on to a much larger project, with construction now underway and plans for ice cream in the summer, warm breads in winter, savory pastries, cakes, salads and sandwiches.
Baby Birdee will have fewer options with only takeout, “but I’m trying to do some interesting things,” Ameni notes, “like our famous bread with an artichoke dip or a lobster roll or a crab dip because it’s seafood focused.” She envisions spending most of her time at Birdee at the beginning saying, “I have a pretty solid team, so I don’t have to be at the restaurants the entire time. They run the show.”
Pastry chefs without a bakery on the horizon Laura Cronin, in particular her approach to lamination, developed after months of trials. On select Saturday mornings, fans line up hours ahead outside Madison Square Park to purchase two of her Madison Squares, laminated pastry with seasonal fillings, along with a beverage and granola. For the grand finale of the 2024 season on November 2nd, Cronin partnered with Dominique Ansel to offer a collaborative version of Bake it Nice with a special limited edition that included might want to note the wildly successful Eleven Madison Park pop-up, Bake it Nice, now in Ansel’s plant-based Cronut filled with raspberry jam and hazelnut linzer cookie ganache, and its second year. The idea is to showcase the plant-based techniques and flavors developed by the restaurant’s executive pastry chef a roasted chestnut and chocolate Madison Square. Of course, the line was long, and the pastries quickly sold out.
(This article appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)
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