My grandmother lived above a bakery on Knickerbocker Avenue. She did not bake. She bought a loaf and two pastries every Saturday for sixty-one years from the same little shop, run by a woman named Junita, who eventually went by Juna because nobody outside the family ever got the pronunciation right.
When Juna closed the shop in 2015, my grandmother brought home an extra loaf that day and put it on the kitchen counter. We ate it slowly over the next week, the way you eat something you know you can't replace. I was seventeen and I thought: someone, somewhere, should keep baking the way she did.
It took me a long time to be that someone.
The bread came out when the bread was ready. The cakes were for the people who remembered to order them. There was no hustle in that shop, and I don't think I've gotten over that.
A long apprenticeship
I spent five years cooking on the line at a restaurant in Manhattan, and three more at a bakery in Paris that everybody assumes I'm name-dropping. I'm not. The bakery is small. They taught me lamination, fermentation, patience, and that you don't sell yesterday's bread at today's price.
I came back to New York in 2020, which turned out to be a strange year to come home. I baked sourdough for my neighbors in Crown Heights out of a converted oven in a shared kitchen. People started waiting on stoops. Somebody wrote about it in a newsletter. The next year I moved upstate, with a starter, a beat-up mixer, and a lease on a small storefront on River Lane.
What Juna Bakes is now
It is a counter, three tables, two ovens, a small team of three including me, and a starter we feed twice a day and call Juno. We bake breads in the morning and pastries before dawn. We make cakes for birthdays and for Saturdays. We close on Mondays because the ovens need a rest and so do we.
We are stubborn about a few things — real butter, slow fermentation, local eggs, honey from a beekeeper named Tom whose hives are six miles up the road. We are flexible about almost everything else. If you want to talk through a cake for your daughter's birthday, come in on a Tuesday afternoon and we'll sit down with tea.
I'd rather sell out at 11am than overproduce. That's the entire business philosophy, on a napkin.
Why we named it Juna
For Junita, who didn't know us, but whose bread shaped a kitchen on the third floor above Knickerbocker for sixty-one years. I hope she would have liked it.