Former engineer built this Bay Area bakery with a cult following

On a recent Saturday, as I waited for my pastries outside of 1 Oz Coffee in Mountain View, I couldn’t help but watch a family of four dig into theirs. The mother pulled apart a raspberry rose croissant dusted with crushed rose petals for her daughter. The flaky top crinkled and shattered; the dough tore into thin delicate layers as rich white mascarpone spilled out, which the girl caught in her palms and brought to her face. A goop of it ended up on her nose. The dad, meanwhile, was sinking his teeth into a mango sticky rice croissant, breaking the smooth orange top to reveal the thick rice pudding inside.

I was worried I’d find Kaya Bakery’s baked goods too pretty to eat — but I couldn’t wait to dig in. 

On most Saturdays, you’ll find pastry chefs and partners Richard Lee and Stephanie Chen distributing their highly in-demand pastry sets in front of a coffee shop around the Bay Area. On this Saturday afternoon, they’ve staked out their territory with a chalkboard sign covered in doodles of croissants. Sitting under a wide tent, Chen is checking off orders and manning the register; Lee is roaming around in front, animatedly chatting with customers.

The raspberry rose and mango sticky rice croissants are only two of the specialties you can find at the couple’s weekly pop-up, which has appeared in almost every region of the Bay Area — including San Francisco, San Mateo, Berkeley, Mountain View, Newark and San Jose — and boasts a mailing list of 5,000 customers. Goods are mainly sold in preordered box sets of five pastries that go live every Sunday and often sell out by Monday evening. The boxes are $32, tax included, and each order includes the option to add on a particular seasonal pastry ($7) or a 6-inch Basque cheesecake ($28), which, Lee and Chen tell me, only gets better with time. If you were to pick up an order, expect to be treated to a range of unique and decadent flavors.

Kaya Bakery has come a long way since its inception in early 2020, right before the pandemic, when Lee was still walking in and out of coffee shops along the Peninsula trying to muster up the courage to ask an owner if he could start a pop-up there.

“It was a nerve-wracking experience walking into random shops as a nobody, pretty much,” Lee told SFGATE about getting Kaya Bakery off the ground. “But many of the businesses welcomed us with open arms.”

By day, Lee is a software engineer and Chen does accounting. Neither Lee nor Chen have formal pastry training, though Lee took one French cooking class at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York in 2017. The bakery was born from, of all things, Lee and Chen’s conversation on a Hinge date in early 2020, right before the pandemic. 

On the date, Lee had told Chen about his longtime dream of starting a bakery pop-up. For several months at that point, he had been testing out recipes at home to prepare for what he might sell. When she heard this story, Chen encouraged Lee to take the leap of faith.

“I said, ‘You know what? We should just go for it,’” Chen said. 

“She was the push for making things happen,” Lee added.

Together, they launched Kaya Bakery’s first pop-up at the now-shuttered Red Giant Coffee in Redwood City. The week preceding, Lee personally delivered pastries to businesses in the area in hopes that they would help promote their pop-up. The day of, they stocked each location with 20 pastries, which was what they anticipated they would sell. The pastries were gone in 15 minutes. The Red Giant Coffee owner called Lee urgently to restock, and with the help of some family members, they made additional deliveries between both locations.

“By the end of the day, we had completely sold out,” Lee said. 

Two weeks later, the pandemic hit. After waiting for a couple weeks, Lee and Chen decided to push forward with another pop-up. They established a delivery system and promoted their bakery on a Facebook group for Asian American entrepreneurs. 

“The response was phenomenal. We got a huge amount of orders,” Lee said. “On that delivery day, we pretty much got zero hours of sleep.”

Still, the massive success of their operation gave them a taste of what Kaya Bakery could become. There was still a tremendous learning curve, however. In those first weeks, every pop-up experienced some kind of mishap between equipment or dough preparation. Once, Lee moved the speed rack with all the pastry boxes too quickly, and a whole stack toppled — meaning that they had to remake all the pastries. Still, they forged on.

“There was a period where I was ready to quit the bakery,” Lee said. “Stephanie was like, ‘You can’t just give up after this. Things are going to be hard in life and you’ve got to deal with that.’”

Their relationship grew around the bakery. Lee and Chen found a rhythm, geared to their personal strengths: Lee in charge of the croissants, and Chen in charge of everything else — the fillings, creams, cakes and cookies. “The bakery has helped us uncover these nuances about each other just from having to do it — who is better at doing what?” Lee says. 

After two months of delivery pop-ups, they switched to preorders and stuck with the model.

Now, Lee and Chen churn out about 300 pastries per week. Immediately after one pop-up ends, the duo plans for the next, experimenting with recipes, drumming up interest on social media. On Fridays, they spend a full 12 hours minding the croissant dough. On Saturdays, they work in the commercial kitchen they rent in Berkeley, right up until they start setting up in the early afternoon. 

As for their flavors, Lee and Chen cite famed French pastry chef Cédric Grolet and Spanish pastry chef Antonio Bachour as influences, as well as online videos, cookbooks, and good old trial and error. It helps that Lee and Chen are voracious foodies, with finely tuned radars for what about a texture or taste might make for a transcendent eating experience. 

“Flavors are what makes Kaya unique,” Lee said. “We try not to sell any plain croissants, chocolate croissants, anything normal.”

Though Lee and Chen use Asian flavors often, they try to expand beyond the typical menu items at other Asian American bakeries in the Bay Area, such as mochi or pineapple buns. When they incorporate traditional Asian flavors, they always try to add a twist — a matcha tiramisu croissant with matcha-covered ladyfingers, an oolong and Irish cream bun that comes with a drizzle of Irish cream liqueur. 

Emphasis is not just on pretty pastries but also how to eat them. Each box comes with a card with painstaking reheating or preparation instructions, in case customers want to store the goods for later. (For instance, Lee and Chen suggest pairing their Basque cheesecake with yuzu jam.)

In particular, Lee and Chen pride themselves on pastries that can be eaten a multitude of ways. In one reel on their Instagram, a knife cuts into a sandwich consisting of their green onion croissant, pork floss and a jammy fried egg, a reference to the way Taiwanese scallion pancakes are created and served. Another features making a sandwich out of their pan-toasted homemade milk bread with Kaya jam and butter, served with a soy sauce and soft-boiled egg dip. 

R&D is their great playground, and a tremendous learning process. “We keep iterating on the pastry until Stephanie likes something,” Lee said. Take their new apple makgeolli croissant. Because apple pie is often served with cold vanilla ice cream, Chen thought to add makgeolli, a Korean rice wine with an effervescent melony flavor, to cut through the heaviness of apple pie the same way ice cream would. Taking inspiration from the apple pie at Winkel 43, a cafe in Amsterdam, which uses spices and a crumble rather than a pastry top, Lee and Chen sprinkle their own croissant with a brown sugar granola crumble infused with jasmine tea they source from Taiwan.

Eventually, Lee and Chen hope to establish a brick-and-mortar — perhaps as early as 2025. They typically pop up at a coffee shop or other business every Saturday, with the next few lined up for Nov. 4, 11 and 18 at the Mountain View outpost of 1 Oz Coffee. 

“Right now, there’s a lot of pent-up demand, because we’re only in a place like once a month,” Lee said, adding that the question for Kaya now is whether that demand can sustain itself week to week. “We’re testing out the waters for Mountain View.”

Lee and Chen know that a good chunk of brick-and-mortar business comes from corporate catering, so they’ve been eyeing locations along the Peninsula, including in San Mateo and Palo Alto. Ultimately, Lee and Chen hope to use their future brick-and-mortar as a way to expand their offerings and bring their customers an experience: a place to hang out and enjoy hot pastries with creative drinks.

“Sometimes customers drive across the bay to get our pastries,” Chen said. “This business is not easy, but it’s the human connection and the gratitude we receive that really keeps us going.”

Kaya Bakery pops up Nov. 4, 11 and 18 from 1 to 3 p.m. at 1 Oz Coffee, 50 Castro St., Suite 130, Mountain View. Follow Kaya Bakery on Instagram or visit its website at www.kayabakery.com.