Radio Bakery in Brooklyn, NY

Kelly Mencin, Chef-Owner

Origins

I worked at Bouchon Bakery in California and then I moved to Bouchon Bistrot, because I wanted a little more of a push. I loved Napa, but New York City was always a dream and Gramercy Tavern, specifically, was always a dream. So I line-cooked there for two years. I loved it. It was there I met Rafiq [Salim], Howard [Kalachnikoff] and Ben [Howell], now my business partners. They started leaving Gramercy because they wanted to open their own restaurant. All my friends talked about savory food and what they wanted to make at home. I just wanted to talk about desserts and sweets. I was always popping my head into the pastry room. Howard and Rafiq were talking about opening their restaurant and I said, “Hey do you guys need a pastry chef?” They didn’t know I went to school [at Johnson & Wales] for pastry.

That was late January of 2020. They hired me to help recipe-test and then the pandemic hit. We pivoted. We couldn’t do indoor dining. I spent the summer recipe testing for Rolo’s which opened in January, 2021 as a café and grocery store. People loved the sandwiches, the focaccia. As time wore on, we had to become a restaurant. Outdoor dining started. I started doing plated desserts. Rafiq and Howard said they couldn’t afford me anymore. I was in the car with Rafiq and he said: “Do you want to open a bakery?” Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would own a bakery in New York City. We opened this in 2023 [in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood] and we have another one [in Prospect Heights]. There are a lot of pinch-me moments.

Company Mission

Radio came to be because pastry chefs in restaurants were a dying breed. It gave me a higher job. Instead of being a pastry chef at a restaurant, I am now running a bakery. Our goal was that eventually we could hire another qualified baker who wanted to grow and be the head of something. We opened the second one because there’s so much talent in the city and not a lot of places for it to go. Most restaurants now can’t afford pastry chefs. A bakery can. That is the mission.

We bring in talented individuals. We nurture them and mentor them until they are able to run the bakery as their own. I don’t know where you can work where you get to understand as much of this business as you can running this bakery. If you want to make it yours, you can. My chef Zoe at [the Prospect Heights location] worked here [in Greenpoint] over a year and a half, worked her way through the stations and was ready for it. They’re getting paid a high salary with great benefits, work/life balance and they’re running a bakery. Per bakery on any given day, we’ll have 18 to 20 working in the space. At both locations, we’ll have 30 to 35. All the bakers get a front-of-the-house shift. They rotate. It is a very cohesive team. Who is better able to sell the pastries than people making them? It also increases their paychecks. They get tips.

Signature Products

The Earl Grey Morning Bun has been on the menu since day one and people would riot if we took it off. It has a lot of real Earl Grey tea in there ground up with citrus sugar. It’s vibrant and citrusy and crunchy and chewy. Our other is our salmon focaccia. It’s a classic New York lox bagel, but it’s better on a focaccia. It’s a little bit lighter with cream cheese, pickled onion, lots of dill.

Our signature items have mostly become our seasonal items. We’re changing the menu constantly. In Summer, we do our tomato croissant, which people freaked out over. Right now, we’re doing a blueberry, coconut lime croissant. It was rhubarb and custard a month ago. People ask me in January where our tomato croissants are. I have to tell them we have really good heirloom tomatoes and they’re not in season. A lot of things here are things I made at Rolo’s. We did an apple brown butter tart there. Here we make this brown butter custard with thinly sliced apples in a croissant. It gets glazed with a cider glaze. It’s fresh. For savory items, we run a French onion soup croissant with a gruyere custard and a nice beautiful slice of caramelized onion on top. It gets glazed with a sherry glaze we make: sherry vinegar, black peppercorns, thyme and it tastes like French onion soup.

Equipment ‘Must-Haves’

Our proofer retarder. A lot of bakeries proof things at an ambient temperature overnight, so they just leave a rack out overnight. Or they come in at 2 a.m. for a normal proofer that has steam and keeps it warm. We specifically chose a proofer retarder. You can load it the day before. It acts as a fridge. Then you set it and it turns on to proof in the middle of the night. You come in and everything is ready for you. It’s a game-changer for us. We can turn it into a freezer. We can store croissants inside. We still proof things at ambient temp. But we proof our nice croissants in there, because they need the humidity. At room temp, they will still proof on the outside, but they will crack because there’s not a lot of humidity in the air.

Production Tip

We’re all about lists and inventory. Every day we take stock of everything we have in-house. There’s a par sheet on it with how much we need. It makes the days go by a lot better, knowing what you’re walking into. We have numbers for how many croissants we make per day. I have an Excel spreadsheet that has the weights of each croissant and how much we’re going to make each day. It does the math for me. It tells me how much dough I need. I created that immediately. I am not a math person. As a baker, I know you should be, but I’m not. As many charts as I can make to make my job easier, I’m all about that. Same for bread. Our bread mixes are locked in every day. I have charts of everything I need so I can refer to that. If I’m not here, everyone can see the numbers. My mom is an artist. I need to be creative and want to create. For me, the math stuff comes later.

Secrets of Success

You have to be able to do things over and over again in order to perfect them and make them better. We don’t make something and stop. The morning bun is our staple, but just recently we changed the shaping style. This constant drive to adapt and be better is essential to our success. Quality over everything. We can’t stop and say, yeah, this is pretty good. No, we need to get it to the point where someone is saying I need to have more. Also, we’re making things people want to eat. Some chefs make things that are creative and inspiring them in the moment, but it’s not reaching the audience. I’m a very nostalgia-based person. A lot of our flavors come from the heart and hit home in that way. We’re not trying to blow anyone’s mind here. We’re trying to make delicious food you keep coming back for.

Future Plans

We just opened our second bakery in Brooklyn. I want some more space for this one. It’s our original location. We’re always going to be busy and we’re hitting the ceiling. In a year, I’d like both bakeries to be running smoothly. I want my bakers and managers to feel like they own it. I want to see more of our staff grow and become managers so we can promote them from within. Will there be another Radio Bakery? Only if we have the proper people to run it. Treat it like it’s your own and one day it may be. I don’t ever want to be out of the kitchen. I don’t want to be a computer person. I got into this career because I want to be on my feet and I want to have my hands in dough. I want to be mentoring and teaching. That makes me very happy. A lot of people are like, I want to be a baker. I like to bake. Well, you’ve got to be here at 4 a.m. You have to love it.

For more info, visit www.radiobakery.nyc

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