27-year-old chef turns old-school SF space into millennial pink bakery

When Sophia Smith started baking buttercream layer cakes for her family and friends during the pandemic, she never expected to launch a business. Now, her North Beach bakery is one of the most highly anticipated openings of the year.

Back when she was a 23-year-old recent graduate of culinary school, Smith was working as a line cook at A16 Pizza in San Francisco. Then, March 2020 hit, and the restaurant shut down. To keep her busy, A16 asked if she wanted to use its empty kitchen for baking, a passion of hers that she saw only as a hobby at the time.

“It took off really quickly. Suddenly, I had like 30 orders in a week and was working 16 hours a day, every day,” she said. “I had to work backwards and make my business legitimate.”

Smith never returned to her restaurant job.

Three years later, the now-27-year-old’s popular pop-up Butter & Crumble is getting its very own brick-and-mortar in North Beach. In a sea of old-school Italian bakeries, Butter & Crumble is an outlier, bringing unconventional and Instagrammable pastries to the neighborhood. Located in the former Tante Marie’s Cooking School, which closed in 2014 after 35 years, the new bakery plans to open Wednesday. 
 
The week before the grand opening, Butter & Crumble’s team bustled around the millennial pink-accented space in matching pink aprons. Smith said she made sure to maintain the homey character of the beloved cooking school run by the James Beard-recognized Mary Risley, just adding her own touches. 

At the front of the store is a robust retail selection filled with potted plants, pink croissant-adorned baseball caps, sweatshirts, greeting cards and tote bags. A white tiled entryway welcomes the customer with the words “freshly baked,” and a pastry case decorated with pink tile is the bakery’s centerpiece. On my visit, a Taylor Swift song played over the speakers. 

To the right of the entryway is a table where bakers will roll pastries, complete with an overhead mirror preserved from the cooking school so everyone can see their handiwork.

“It’s always been my dream to have an open format bakery where you can really see how we make the pastries,” Smith said.

Smith was initially attracted to the space when she found out that her mom, who taught her to bake, had once taken cooking classes at Tante Marie’s. To honor that history, Smith is planning to eventually offer her own croissant-baking classes at Butter & Crumble, which she also offered at her most recent Marina District pop-up location at 3318 Fillmore St. 

But before there were croissants, there were cakes. Butter & Crumble is named for the style of cakes that are Smith’s bread and butter: buttercream-frosted cakes with a texturally contrasting crumble (think cinnamon oat crumble or chocolate chip cookie crumble). She also doesn’t frost the exterior of the cakes, leaving their eye-catching layers exposed.

“The thought behind that is just that we really focus on flavor with the cakes, not so much what they look like,” Smith said. “I think there are a lot of cake artists out there who do such gorgeous cakes, so we’re trying to focus on what they taste like. And I want you to be able to see what’s inside.” 

Some of her most popular cakes include strawberry shortcake, caramelized white chocolate carrot cake, lemon bar crumble and chocolate ganache toffee. Her culinary school background informs her flavors, as she always incorporates salt and acid to balance the sweetness.

“They’re all supposed to be pastries where you can eat the whole slice of cake and not exhaust your palate,” she said.

After two years of popping up in various shared kitchen spaces in San Francisco selling her popular cakes, cookies and pies, Smith decided she was ready to tackle new terrain: croissants. In the summer of 2022, she put Butter & Crumble on pause to attend pastry school in Paris for two months. 

“I have always loved laminated pastry, and I’ve always been really intimidated by that process, and just thought there would be no other time in my career to drop everything and chase that dream,” she said. 

Two months turned into three when she decided to stay in Paris for an internship at Boulangerie Baptiste, a bakery run by celebrated French chef Joël Defives. Smith didn’t speak any French, and Defives didn’t speak English, so they communicated mostly through hand signals, she said. 

“I spent the first week just watching everything he was doing, and then I kind of picked up on cues,” she said. “… I learned so much from him.” 

As soon as Smith returned to San Francisco, she purchased a laminator and dove headfirst into croissant-making. She didn’t intend to start selling croissants for a while, but when she started posting photos of her experiments on Instagram, customers begged to buy them. She began taking preorders, and they sold out immediately. 

“Before we knew it, we had a line down the block every Saturday and Sunday, and that’s when we started thinking about getting our own space,” Smith said. 

Smith may have learned the traditional croissant-making technique in France, but the flavors of her croissants are anything but traditional. One of her most popular offerings is a pistachio cardamom sugar croissant; another is a bacon, egg and cheese croissant, a spiral of breakfasty goodness filled with bacon, garlic and cheddar cheese and topped with a soft-baked egg yolk.

She credits her penchant for unique flavor combinations to her background in the savory realm. 

“I applied what I learned in culinary school to baking, which gave me a very different perspective than most pastry chefs,” she said. “I think it gave me the freedom to break the rules because I didn’t really know them and I wasn’t afraid to experiment right off the get-go.”  

Smith also plans to debut some new pastries for opening day: a croissant called the “Morty P,” with pistachio pesto, mortadella and Gruyere, and a Danish with herb bechamel, mushrooms, potatoes and garlic oil. 

During the construction of the North Beach brick-and-mortar, Smith couldn’t bake for months. So she and her assistant Nicki Volante embarked for Europe once again, this time to seek pastry inspiration. They returned brimming with new ideas; for example, a chai sugar pastry made with croissant dough scraps on Butter & Crumble’s opening menu was inspired by a bakery in Copenhagen. 

Also on the opening menu is a cinnamon pain au chocolat, a pumpkin cruffin and a pecan pain suisse. There will always be one vegan and one gluten-free option on the menu, like Butter & Crumble’s gluten-free banana-cinnamon coffee cake, Smith said, and the bakery will serve drip coffee and cold brew made with beans from Abanico Coffee Roasters, a Mission District cafe and roaster. The bakery will also have classics like a butter croissant and a chocolate chip cookie, and wedding cakes will be available for preorder.

As Butter & Crumble nears opening day, though, red tape has made the journey anything but easy. As Smith told the San Francisco Chronicle last week, miscommunication she encountered during the permitting process doubled her costs and delayed the project (the Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms). 

Being a young woman opening her first business, she said it’s also been challenging to garner respect as a business owner. 

“I just feel like nobody thinks I know what I’m doing,” she said. “… and I always feel like I have to overprove myself, which is really frustrating.”

As of Monday, Smith was feeling more confident about the bakery’s opening date, but things were still up in the air. If final inspections go according to plan, Butter & Crumble will open its doors to the croissant-adoring public on Wednesday. 

“I am not sleeping. … I’m just riding on vibes,” she said. “I’m so excited and really, really nervous. It kind of feels unreal.”

Butter & Crumble, 271 Francisco St., San Francisco. Opening hours are 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.