It’s not breaking news to acknowledge we’re living through a golden age of East Bay pop-ups. Pop-up bakeries in particular are setting up their temporary tables and stands almost every week. They’re forming symbiotic mutually beneficial relationships with restaurants, cafes and specialty markets across the region. To bring in foot traffic, social media announcements include monthly schedules and photo previews of tempting menus.
I’ve sampled baked goods from Oven Lovin’ at Bad Walter’s, Droo the Baker at Morningtide and Haochi at Honey Bird Market. But I can’t keep up with the amount of new bakeries that keep showing up in my feed, all vying for the attention of a hungry roving public. Some of the most persistent ones have secured brick-and-mortar locations for themselves.
This summer, Liz Khuu’s Milk Cloud Bakery moved into La Noisette Sweets’ kitchen in Berkeley. After four years of popping SoDo Donuts up at Gilman Wine Block’s First Fridays, Elle Cowan recently secured a weekend residency at Hammerling Wines. But Joyce Tang’s Bake Sum might just take the cake for pop-up success stories. Within five years of opening a first location on Grand Avenue, Tang opened a second location this year in Alameda’s Marketplace. Her first cookbook will be published this fall.
Melissa Chou’s Grand Opening Bakery is following and also not following in Tang’s flour-dusted footprints. She’s the sole proprietor and the lone employee at her pop-up. And she’s content to have bake sales once a week and sometimes less than that. Word of mouth has gotten out about Grand Opening and her neighbor’s bakery, Studio Estepan. On Saturday mornings, the line to get into their shared space is formidable and formidably slow-moving. But Chou’s devotees are willing to stand in place for one of her caramelized pineapple bolo baos as the morning hours slip away.
Chou and I spoke about the possibility of her pop-up leading to a shop one day. “I’ve run the numbers, and I’ve thought about what it would be like to open a whole brick-and-mortar thing and have employees and be open five or seven days a week,” she said. “And it’s not something that really appeals to me.”
Since she started selling her cookies, cakes and pastries in West Oakland, the combination of pre-order and retail sales is succeeding as a sustainable business model. “I’m at capacity for how much work I can actually do on my own,” Chou explained. “And it’s enough.”
She shares the rent with Studio Estepan’s Estevan Silva, which is part of what appealed to Chou about the location. “I’ve never had an employee, so I’m making it work,” she said. Chou and Silva are both culinary alumni of San Francisco’s Quince Restaurant. After Silva signed the lease in West Oakland, he reached out to her. “He was thinking about how he could bring in somebody else to use the space when he wasn’t there,” Chou pointed out.
Silva had been to Grand Opening many times before in its original incarnation as a side project at Brandon Jew’s Mister Jiu’s. Chou used to be the pastry chef there. After Chou came up with the idea and operated Grand Opening as a little in-house bakery, Jew gave her the freedom to take charge of it. With 17k followers, Chou already had a healthy fan base before she moved into the West Oakland kitchen.
“Estevan and I decided we were going to do these sales on Saturdays together,” she said. “It can be kind of hectic for sure. We’re still working on what the logistics are.” When Grand Opening holds a Saturday bake sale, Chou posts the details on the website and on Instagram. On the website, customers can pre-order whole cakes, tarts and cookies. “Then if you come on Saturdays, there will be a selection of all the tarts, cake slices, as well as pastries,” she added. “You don’t have to pre-order those.”
Chou grew up in San Francisco. Her cooking is influenced by “all kinds of stuff” that she grew up eating. “I like to say it’s a Bay Area bakery that’s reflective of the types of places I’ve worked in and all the food that we have here,” she noted. “So it’s gonna lean Asian, it’s gonna lean Chinese, but now that I’m not in Chinatown anymore, I feel like I can do some other things.
“Once I started the business on my own,” Chou continued, “I was thinking about how I could use my experience as a pastry chef in a bakery world. All of the tarts and cakes that I make are a way of conceiving a dessert on a plated menu, except for one item.”
Some of those other delectable things include black sesame peanut scrolls, cherry almond crostada, peach tatin bretons and a strawberry jasmine choux cake.
“At the very beginning, there were bolo baos and cocktail buns,” Chou said. “And I still do things like that, but since I’ve been making them for so long, I have re-conceived versions of them.”
She now makes the cocktail buns with a laminated milk bread. “It’s like a cinnamon roll pastry presentation,” she noted. The basic flavor profiles are similar from those early days, but there’s been a tantalizing aesthetic evolution. The beauty and sophistication of Chou’s creations almost make one forget about the long line that inevitably forms on Saturday mornings.
Grand Opening, 2311 Magnolia St., West Oakland. For bake sale announcements, check IG: @grandopening___or grandopeningbakery.com.
