Ayu Bakehouse in New Orleans, L.A.

Samantha Weiss, Chef/Co-owner

Origins

My business partner, Kelly Jack, and I met in pastry school in New York 13 years ago. After school, we worked at Breads Bakery in New York City. She thought she would just go to New York for a year and ended up staying for nine years. When Covid hit, she was able to work remotely for them during her time away because she was their COO. I was their catering and wholesale sales manager. I was going to work remotely until somebody took over my job. Unfortunately, the whole department just got put on hiatus. We actually left New York on the same day. In 2020, I moved to California and Kelly moved to New Orleans. She had gone to Tulane for college.

I ended up not taking a position in California, which allowed us to say to each other: if we had our own place, what would we do? We talked about an ice cream shop, but we scrapped that. Nine months passed and she called me up and said, “I think I’m going to open a bakery.” And I was like, “well, I’m not doing anything, so. I’d like to come with you.” That was in January of 2021. We worked on a concept for months. There were three commercial places available to lease, including the one we picked. We didn’t think this place was actually attainable, because it just seemed too nice, but we reached out to the broker. The owner was being very choosy as to who he would have in the space. He loved our idea, so we were able to sign a lease pretty quickly. We thought we would only have three months of construction. Unfortunately, Hurricane Ida hit right before we were supposed to sign a contract, and it changed everything. We had to piecemeal the project together on our own. We ended up opening in June of 2022.

Company Mission

We have a big focus on freshness. We like to bake throughout the day, which means that you might even come in an hour before we’re closing and there’s a good chance you’re still getting something hot out of the oven. Also, we want fresh, local produce, especially when it comes to fruits and vegetables. We have a lot of specials that have seasonal fruit in our lunch and on our sandwiches.

Signature Products

We have a few of the French classics. We’re classically trained, but we like to take those techniques, use the flavors we love, and kind of map out our own new one-of-a-kind items. Of course, we have a croissant and a baguette. Ours is a sourdough baguette. Two big things are the muffaletta breadstick and a Boodin Boy. We do have a lot of savory pastries here. New Orleans is known for muffalettas. We’re on Frenchman Street. We like the idea that you can walk down the street with something to eat in one hand and a drink in your other hand. The muffaletta breadstick has got all the components of the sandwich. You’ve got the meats and cheeses. We make our own Giardiniera. And there’s this nice cheese that comes from when it’s melting in the oven. It’s irresistible.

The boudin sausage is also very local. It’s the mild version. We bake that in the oven, crumble it into the center of our laminated croissant dough, and we add a soft-boiled egg that we quarter. Then we close that up. You have this extremely crunchy, flaky sort of sausage roll, but elevated. And we pair that with hot peanut chili oil. It’s irresistible.

As far as sweets, we’re known for our cornbread cookie that has jalapeno powder in there, so it starts off sweet. Then you have the flavor of the jalapeno and then you have the slightest kick on the back end. Nothing lingers like you’re eating buffalo wings, but it’s so enjoyable and unexpected, you know.

We have a kaya bun. Kaya is Southeast Asian. It comes from my business partner, Kelly. Her grandmother’s side of the family lives in Singapore. When she goes there, she loves kaya toast, which is what they have for breakfast typically. And so we made this wonderful Kaya jam, spread it through the layers and rolled it up. It’s a staple on the menu now. We partially bake it and then we put a large dollop of more kaya jam in the center. And when it comes out of the oven, we kiss it with some simple syrup and roll it in some coconut. It’s my favorite sweet item that we have here because it’s not too sweet. If you like vanilla and coconut notes, you’ll like it even though there’s no vanilla in it.

Equipment ‘Must-Haves’

For us, it’s not so much about what the piece of equipment is, but ensuring that what we have is reliable. Maybe it’s our deck oven. You just don’t get necessarily the same results in a conventional oven. I think that allows our items to seem like one-of-a-kind. You expect it for bread and pizza, but we also use it for pastries.

Production Tip

Have systems in place. Get yourself organized. Make sure everyone understands what their roles are. Here are the responsibilities on Monday, on Tuesday and every day. Have the recipes written. Have your SOPs in place for every part of your business. This place needs to be able to function without our presence, so we can both leave at the same time if we need to and know that the place is not going to fall apart, because everybody has their instructions and knows whom they should contact if things go wrong.

Secrets of Success

You can have a great product, but it needs to be consistent. I’m always saying that you’re only as good as your last performance. Every day you’re proving yourself again or you’re redeeming yourself from the day before. We strive to have consistent experience for the customer and with our staff and how they’re all treated. Something else we value is sustainability, both environmentally and financially. We focus on having compostable, single-use things here. Financially, we want to make decisions that work for the long haul. Consistency.

Future Plans

We’ve been approached numerous times to open a second location and we keep going back to the thought that there’s still so much that can be done within our current doors. So, I think that the focus is to go deeper within what we currently have and not wider.

We’ve been working to come up with a leadership training program for our current manager and for people we’d like to build up within our organization. It would be good to have our own army of people ready to move up and have less of a learning curve once they make it to a management position. Then we also have something called Ayu Schoolhouse. We do an eight-course series with our staff, teaching them how to create their own business plan that allows them to pitch a pop-up idea to us. We green lit one of them to be able to host here for a month on the weekends.

The winner of that last year has pop-ups four nights a week, so she has additional income for herself. And I think the long-term goal for her is to be able to get a brick and mortar. It’s wonderful to see, because I had so many staff coming to me asking me what classes they should take if they wanted to open their own business.

You can read books and you can go to class, but you kind of need to do it. Let’s create a safe space where you have very little risk to do it on your own. We’ll help them build a business plan and then the reward is likely going to be that we give them maybe some sort of stipend to get them on their feet.

Especially in an industry where you have a lot of people who didn’t necessarily go to college or can afford to take classes, maybe they have this dream that they want to have their own place, but we told them hey, if you do this exercise and at the end of it, you decide, oh, actually this is not for me, that is a great outcome too, because then you know.

We also want to partner with a local farmer or farmers who make things for us that we use consistently like the pandan leaves that we use in our kaya jam. We’re told that that can actually grow very nicely in Louisiana, so we’re actually trying to find someone to make that for us. Maybe it’s a ten-year goal to have our own farm.

There’s still work that would allow us to streamline our processes a bit more, especially during king cake season. There are parties that are interested in working with us, but it might require that we invest in some more equipment and we just have to identify what the bottlenecks are that allow for us to grow in our current space. We could always extend hours, too. Right now, we’re open between eight and two on Mondays and Tuesdays and 8 to 3:30 the rest of the week. We’ve talked plenty about switching into an early evening concept or maybe there’s some things you can pick up on your way home to either add to your dinner or to be your dinner.

For more info, visit www.instagram.com/ayubakehousenola

(This article appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)