Hani’s Bakery in New York, NY

Miro Uskokovic, Chef, Owner

Origins

Hani [pronounced Honey] is my mother’s nickname. She was a great baker, great cook, great farmer as well. I grew up on a dairy farm in Serbia. My mother would make cheese for us — cottage cheese, feta cheese, yogurt, sour milk — for us to enjoy as well as to sell, and she also did the same thing with cakes. She was working on building her own bakery. But just as my family erected the structure, the war in Bosnia and Yugoslavia started and we just stopped the project until the dust settled ten years later. Unfortunately, when she could think about it again, she got diagnosed with ovarian cancer when I was 17 and she passed away a few years later without realizing her dream. When she was ill, I started learning how to cook and bake, and I decided I wanted that to be my career.

I did work in a bakery when I started my career in Indiana, but most of my career was in restaurants. For years, I was pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern, Jean-Georges, Aldea. I loved the thrill of service, plated desserts and late-night hours, but eventually as you age, you crave a different kind of environment and challenge. I always wanted to do something on my own. Gramercy Tavern was a contemporary American restaurant and those were the desserts I loved, so it was natural for me [in Nov. 2024] to open a bakery that focused on American-style desserts. You can see a carrot cake and brownie and Rice Krispies.

Company Mission

I wanted to open an American-style bakery with desserts that were nostalgic for the customers, but also artisanal. Most bakeries in New York were leaning into a French or middle-European direction. It’s understandable, because the croissant craze has been infecting the city. There aren’t places where you can go into the city at 4 p.m. and have a familiar slice of carrot cake made in an artisanal way.

Signature Products

Number one is our triple chocolate chunk cookie. We sell hundreds, if not thousands, each week. We use Valrhona in all our chocolates, and we go through a lot of chocolate. Our triple chocolate chunk has three different types of chocolate: black, milk and white.

Second is our cinnamon buns. If we could produce more, we’d probably sell more. But it is a yeasted dough, so it’s a little temperamental and not as easy to produce as a cookie.

Then carrot cake surprisingly. I was really surprised to see people coming in at 8 a.m. to get a piece of carrot cake. Number four is the brownie. Number five is the Rice Krispies. One a slow day, we probably sell a hundred servings of Rice Krispies; hundreds on the weekends. We buy pistachios in 30-pound bags once or twice a week to go with them. When I first tried them, it took me a while to wrap my head around that. But today, I see it as a wonderful complex thing with the cereal and the marshmallow. It’s crispy, chewy. You can make it with beautiful pistachios and halva.

Equipment ‘Must-Haves’

Our Hobart mixer is what we can’t live without. We have different sizes. They’re really valuable for making doughs, cakes. That one is from the writer Rose Levy Beranbaum. That’s her mixer that she gifted to us when we opened. I believe the mixer is 30-years old. We use it every day when we make our honey cakes and blackout cakes.

Production Tip

This is one of the most challenging markets you can find. Be persistent. There will be a lot of obstacles, especially if you try to do it on your own. We are not part of a restaurant group. We don’t have millionaire investors. It’s a family-run business with [wife] Shilpa [an editor at Bon Appetit] and I as owners. Our investors are mostly friends and family. It took us three years to find a space and sign a lease, so I’d say be prepared for the worst and hope for the best. Things will not all turn out as you planned.

Trying to take recipes I made at Gramercy Tavern and scale them up into much larger batches is not an easy thing. One cake in a small mixer is different than trying to scale it up into a 50-pound batch. You have adjustments in the recipes with leaveners and fats. You will have curveballs.

I was 41 when I started the business and I don’t regret waiting. Take your time. You have to learn P&Ls and marketing. I had to learn about the equipment. You have to be an electrician, a plumber, a contractor and an accountant. Even when you hire someone to do those things, you have to know the basics, because no one cares about your business like you care about it. In the end, the final bill for building the space came to $950,000. That included the lawyer fees, branding, build out, buying equipment. That’s probably an average in Manhattan. I have to make sure we hit the numbers to pay employees, purveyors, rent. So far, we’ve managed.

Future Plans

From the moment we opened, it’s been insane. I am amazed by how fast we’ve established ourselves here and the love and I support we’ve enjoyed. We’re starting to add savory items like our flatbreads, certain grab-and-go items like veggies and dip. Our goal is to add a sandwich program. We’re starting to train our cooks for that program. We’re planning to keep our flatbreads for the morning, then sandwiches. We just launched our whole-cake program online. We’re starting a takeout window as we approach the warmer months. We might do some things in the evening as well, and we’re talking about getting a soft- serve machine. We’re focused on maximizing this space. We have enough challenges for now.

Photos by Mark Weinberg

For more info, visit https://www.hanisnyc.com/

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