potrero view
Photograph by Lisa Tehrani

Photograph by Lisa Tehrani

Jolt n’ Bolt’s selection of sweets can be irresistable, especially for occupants of the American Industrial Center where new confections are made daily.

April 2010

Bakeries Rising on the Hill

By Mike Stillman

Pinkie’s

 Located on De Haro Street between 16th and 17th streets, Pinkie’s bakery is the newest addition to Potrero Hill’s roster of top notch bakeries. After a year and a half sourcing breads to local restaurants, as well as pies and cakes to Rainbow Grocery, Pinkie’s owner Cheryl Burr opened her retail location last fall.

Since graduating from City College of San Francisco’s culinary arts program a decade ago, Burr has worked as a pastry chef for hotels and restaurants in San Francisco and Hawaii, including serving as the baker and pastry chef for Bacar.  Since it opened six months ago Pinkie’s has developed a devout following.  Burr estimates that roughly half of her customers visit her shop daily.

Burr’s morning clientele consists of workers from nearby offices, as well as local residents.  Pinkie’s offers Blue Bottle coffee and an assortment of home-style pastries and desserts, including pecan sticky buns, seasonal muffins, organic banana bread, and bacon cheddar onion brioche rolls.  “You won’t find croissants here, but you will find the best cinnamon rolls and buttermilk biscuits – with homemade jam! – served in a super cute and comfortable shop,” Burr said via email.  In the afternoons, Burr sells cupcakes, cookies, brownies, blondies, pecan bars, and macaroons.  Customer favorites include cake by the slice and whole panna cottas, creme brulees and bread pudding, each sold in re-usable mason jars.  Burr also offers boxes of assorted pastries made from organic ingredients and sold in recycled packaging.

On a recent weekend, Burr was busy filling orders for 500 slider buns, a wedding cake for 300, a three tiered birthday cake for 50, and an order of two dozen breakfast pastries. Amid the baking chaos Burr received an email from a customer who bought a birthday cake from Pinkie’s for a friend, stating that the cake was so beautiful and delicious it brought the birthday girl to tears. With reactions like that, Pinkie’s will undoubtedly become a Potrero Hill mainstay.

Baked

 Baked, located on one of the Hill’s main drags – 18th Street between Connecticut and Missouri – isn’t much bigger than an oversized sheet cake.  The bakery serves a variety of home-style items, including cookies, bars, cupcakes, muffins, and scones. The store also offers custom-made cakes and holiday themed offerings, with co-owner Andrea Ortega handling most of the decorating for their decadent creations.

Ortega and her partner Tina Fisher opened their shop two years ago, after Fisher had spent five years working as a pastry chef around the City, including a stint at Town Hall.  Always a baking hobbyist, Fisher worked in data administration and finance until she enrolled in culinary school eight years ago.  Ortega, who also had attended culinary school, worked as a general manager at Williams-Sonoma before opening Baked.  Neither Fisher nor Ortega had ever owned their own business.  They made up for their lack of experience with their strong work ethic and commitment to making great pastries.

The pair remain the bakery’s only two employees, but according to Fisher it’s their small operating space and two person staff that sets them apart from other San Francisco bakeries.  All of their pastries are made without preservatives.  The bakery doesn’t have a freezer, so Fisher and Ortega have little room for error when making decisions about what pastries to sell.  The duo appear to have been making the right moves:  the bakery was recently featured in 7x7 Magazine, and certain items, like brownies and red devil cup cakes, have become Potrero Hill favorites.

Patisserie Philippe

 After visiting his brother in Europe, Nelson Tolentino was inspired to embark on a major career change.  For nineteen years, Tolentino had worked as a pharmaceutical salesman for the industry’s leading companies, including Johnson and Johnson, Squibb, and GlaxoSmithKline. But he’d grown weary of his exhaustive travel schedule.  While in Paris, he was so impressed by the cafes that he decided to open a Parisian style pastry shop in his hometown of San Francisco; a city he felt was full of Francophiles but lacking in high end pastry shops. “I saw a need for more nice pastry shops here...I felt that we deserved a nice pastry shop in San Francisco, just like the ones they have in Paris,” said Tolentino.

He enlisted his friend, pastry chef Philippe Delarue, a native of Les Mans, France who started his career as an apprentice in France and has worked as the head pastry chef for restaurants in London, Montreal, and across the United States. Tolentino and Delaure are now co-owners of the chic French style bistro Patisserie Philippe, located at 655 Townsend Street.  

For the past three years Patisserie Philippe has been serving a variety of pastries that are common in Paris but can be hard to find in San Francisco.  Offerings include well-known treats like croissants, éclairs and macaroons, as well as lesser known French desserts, like the popular Verdon Cake, which consists of layers of hazelnut and chocolate mousse, meringue, and rum with a chocolate glaze.

Patisserie Philippe also features a French style lunch menu which includes baguettes and paninis.  And the bakery sells a variety of impressive wedding cakes, including the elegant Croquembouche.  Shaped like a cone and filled with pastry crème, this cake is considered a masterpiece for French pastry chefs.

Mi2 Sweets

 Mimi Young is the owner and sole employee of Mi2 Sweets, a custom bakery located on De Haro Street between 16th and 17th streets, in the same building as Pinkie’s. After sixteen years working as a pastry chef for a number of Bay Area establishments – including John Frank, Grand Café and Scala’s Bistro – Young opened her own bakery a little under a year ago. She sells wholesale pastries to a couple of Financial District cafés.  But the core of her business is custom orders. Young’s website proudly displays the logo, “If you can dream it, Mi2 Sweets can make it.” According to Young, because she doesn’t have a storefront to maintain she can be creative, and tailor her pastries to her customer’s exact needs. In the short time she’s been in business Young has developed a reputation for making great tasting, unique pastries. She describes her style as putting standard ingredients together in an unusual way.  “I don’t consider myself all that quirky, but I do stuff that’s not run of the mill,” Young said. Some of her more popular creations are her chocolate peanut butter bars and maple bacon blondies. Her red velvet cupcakes, currently a hot item in the bakery world, are also a customer favorite.

Although Young knows aesthetics are crucial for selling pasties, she believes that deserts should taste good first, and avoids the use of inedible props or supports in her custom wedding and birthday cakes. To order one of Young’s one of a kind creations, visit her website www.mi2sweets.com.

Jolt n’ Bolt

Tucked away in a 600 square foot space in the basement of the American Industrial Center (AIC) on 3rd and 20th streets, Jolt n’ Bolt can be hard to find.  But during lunch hour in-the-know locals line up out the door to sample their soups, salads, sandwiches, cakes and cookies. This first rate bakery can be accessed through an entrance on 3rd Street or through a loading dock on Illinois Street.

Jolt n’ Bolt owners Gerhardt and Mary Mechler offer catering services, and sell wholesale deserts to restaurants under their business Creative International Pastries. In 1989, the couple launched their enterprise, working a midnight to 8 a.m. shift in a shared kitchen on Folsom Street. They moved to the AIC building in 1990, and now operate out of four units in the facility. Jolt n’ Bolt opened in 1996.

The café’s lunch menu rotates daily, and consists of eight or so options, usually including foccia and pannini sandwiches and the occasional pasta or fried rice dish. A popular half sandwich and soup combination is  always on offer. Jolt n’ Bolt’s pastries are the same ones that Gerhardt Michler serves through his catering business, which has handled such big name events as the opening of the San Francisco Opera and the Black and White Ball. A pastry chef since the age of 16, Michler learned the trade while growing up in his native Austria. He still garnishes his cakes, tarts, macroons, and tiramisu squares with fresh fruit, in a distinctly European style.

 

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