PARKER>> Alen Ramos and Carolyn Nugent had worked side by side in the kitchens of some of the best restaurants in the world, including El Bulli on the Spanish coast and the Fat Duck in the English countryside. But they finally found their calling in the Denver suburbs.

“When the pandemic hit, we were working for someone else, building their empire again. We said, ‘OK, it’s time to do something different,’” Ramos said.

They moved from Chicago to Parker, where Ramos has family, and like many other bakers in 2020, started a bakery out of their home, then opened Poulette Bakeshop the following year.

Located in a strip mall between a tutoring center and an IV hydration business, Poulette is an unlikely destination for world-class French pastry. But its customers have enthusiastically folded the couple’s honoré bretagnes and vanilla bean spandauers into the suburban rituals of birthday parties and post-baseball game treats.

“A 6-year-old had a canelé for the first time at our bakery,” Ramos said. “Where else would he go to get a canelé?”

From Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Camden, Maine, independent bakeries — long seen as an endangered species — are flourishing, offering meticulous sourdough loaves, French pastries and refined versions of American classics like brownies and cookies. In markets where a fancy French or innovative Korean restaurant might have trouble succeeding, a bakery making ube halaya croissants or cinnamon-Okinawan sugar toast — devotedly chronicled on Instagram — can find lines out the door.

In addition, the more favorable economics of running a bakery — fewer employees, smaller spaces to rent, no need for dinnerware — combined with fewer restaurant pastry chef jobs and a wave of serious hobbyists turning their passion into a profession, have in the past several years helped create a golden age for bakeries in America.

Nugent said that as the cost of restaurant meals skyrocketed during the height of the pandemic, diners turned to pastries for their culinary adventures. “You can go to McDonald’s and get a fried apple pie for $1.99, or you can decide to spend a little bit more for something made with freshly milled flour, fresh local apples, made with technique and baked fresh for you that day,” she said.

Bakeries are booming even in expensive cities where many restaurants are struggling, like Los Angeles. Jennifer Yee cut her teeth in fine dining, including at the French Laundry, and never imagined she would own a bakery. But during the pandemic, she worked alone making croissants, a multiday process usually done by several cooks.

“That gave me confidence to be able to own a bakery,” she said, along with time to reassess what she wanted out of life. “I was like, ‘I just gotta do it.’”

Sustainability is a passion of Yee’s, so her Bakers Bench pop-up featured entirely vegan pastries, and quickly built a following.

After operating out of a kiosk for a few years, Yee opened her first stand-alone space in 2024, serving all-vegan croissants, Danishes, scones and more.

Like a number of former pastry chefs, she said that one of her goals was to train her employees in the traditions she had learned in fine dining but without the accompanying negativity.

“I have a team of six people. If there’s one thing I’m really proud of, it’s them. I provided six jobs, and they all seem happy,” Yee said.

During the initial pandemic shutdowns in 2020, pastry makers were often the first to be furloughed at restaurants. In many cases, those jobs did not come back.

Nugent of Poulette said that while running a pastry department is great training for running a business, restaurant owners don’t see it that way.

“If you’re a pastry chef, you’re never going to own that restaurant, you’re never going to surpass the executive chef, you’re never going to surpass the chef de cuisine,” she said. “Honestly, what is the motivation to stay?”

Add to that the cost of living in major markets where many fine dining restaurants are, and you’ve got the recipe for an exodus. The pandemic provided a mass opportunity for those highly trained individuals to take the gamble of ownership.

In 2019, Elaine Uykimpang Bentz moved from Chicago to Cincinnati to start a restaurant with her partner, Erik Bentz, after building a career in fine dining pastry.

“I didn’t want to open a bakery, honestly, because when we were first starting, I knew it was financially so impossible to make it work,” she said. After finding success with a pastry home delivery service during the pandemic, the couple were inspired to make baked goods a major component of their restaurant, Cafe Mochiko, which has since garnered national acclaim.

“I’m glad that all these bakeries are getting so much attention,” Uykimpang Bentz said. “I’m wondering if the pastry chefs that were let go from their restaurant gigs during the pandemic, if this is their time to shine. That’s great.”

A number of the new bakery owners come from an entirely different background: obsessive home sourdough bakers. Jesús Brazón, owner of Caracas Bakery outside Miami, got his start baking bread at home in 2013. He kept at it for years, even though he was perpetually dissatisfied by the results.

“I was spending two days fermenting it in the fridge and baking it the next day, and I had to wait 45 minutes for it to come out, and it was so funky,” he said.

The turning point came when he learned to read his dough and follow its endless variations. He realized that “the dough is alive.”

He began sharing bread with family and friends. A friend with a restaurant asked him to bake loaves for them. He thought about adding a little weekend sourdough and coffee operation to his graphic design business, only to decide that, with the investment required, he might as well open a full-time bakery. His father, Manuel, a chef, taught him to make French-style pastry and partnered with him in the business.

Now, Brazón is managing a successful bakery with three locations, and his days are taken up with spreadsheets and payroll, not tinkering with bread.

“When we started to grow,” he said, “I lost a bit of the fun part of baking, but I’m passionate about it because I’m feeding so many people.”

In the 2010s, baking sourdough bread at home went from a quirky, hippie affectation to a serious hobby. Chad Robertson’s 2006 book “Tartine Bread,” which broke down that bakery’s famous country loaf in a now equally famous 38 pages, laid the groundwork, and the flywheel of social media popularized the hobby with an irresistible mix of health claims, deceptively simple process posts and photogenic crumb shots.

Peter Mitchell, co-owner of the Sour, a homey bakery with a pressed-tin ceiling in the historic downtown of Rapid City, South Dakota, said, “I tell everyone who comes into my bakery and asks me where I learned, I tell them: I went to the University of YouTube.”

Like Brazón’s, his business has grown quickly, and organically to keep up with demand during the pandemic. After starting out selling from his house while working full time as a corrections officer in 2020, Mitchell opened a retail bakery with his wife, Makenzie, within a couple of years. In 2024, they opened an even larger location.

“I don’t know what the ceiling on this really is,” Mitchell said. “I’m very thankful for Rapid City. We’re not a big town in comparison to other places. Our customers love us enough to keep coming back.”

Many bakery owners have found that operating a brick-and-mortar bakery gives them more flexibility than other types of food businesses, creating space for them to cook on their own terms.

Part of that is keeping hours that are easier to live with than those at restaurants. Chelsea Kravitz, who operates the Place in Camden, Maine, started her bakery after suffering from a severe case of burnout as a restaurant worker and, later, owner.

“My quality of life is massively increased from other jobs I’ve had in the hospitality industry,” said Kravitz, who previously owned an all-day cafe in Glen Head on Long Island, New York, where she worked 100 hours a week. The Place is open Friday through Sunday, with enough time for laundry, errands and life after closing midafternoon.

“If getting up at 3 a.m. is the one sacrifice I make half the week, it’s really not so bad,” Kravitz said.

Some bakers have found great success with even more limited hours. Country Bird Bakery in Tulsa, Oklahoma, opens on Saturdays, and some occasional one-off weekdays announced online, and that’s it. Before it opens Saturday mornings, there’s a line down the block.

“People tell their friends about us: ‘Oh, my gosh, do you know about this bakery only open one day a week?’” said Cat Cox, the owner.

At Country Bird, Cox emphasizes using whole and locally milled grains, including a small amount made in her bakery’s own mill, purchased from an Oklahoma farmer. The Saturday offerings include crowd-pleasers like country loaves and morning buns as well as more playful items like a French onion soup Danish. Many of the pastries are made with rye flour or unusual wheat varieties.

“We’ve built a certain level of trust with our guests,” Cox said. “Maybe it sounds a little weird, but they haven’t had anything they dislike at the bakery, so if you’re making it, I’m sure it’s good.”

Bakeries also allow pastry chefs trained in fine dining kitchens to do the kind of storytelling with local ingredients and high technique they once pursued at the end of a tasting menu in a much more approachable but no less compelling way.

In 2020, Kaitlin Guerin moved back to New Orleans after working pastry at Restaurant 108 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and State Bird Provisions in San Francisco. This year, she opened Lagniappe Bakehouse after running it for almost four years as a pop-up, where she refined both her menu and the story she wants to tell about Black Southern foodways.

One item on her menu that she says speaks to this approach is her corn muffin, the type of simple sweet treat she’d never imagined putting on a menu. Lagniappe’s version is made with Anson Mills cornmeal and fresh, seasonal corn, with a corn husk for the muffin liner and a swoop of honey butter on top.

“The cornmeal muffin is so grounded,” she said. “It’s reinventing something very classic and Southern and Black using good ingredients, and it tastes so good.” Corn just went out of season, so despite its popularity, Guerin won’t bring it back until next August.

The bakery’s location is part of that storytelling, too. It occupies a renovated house in the Central City neighborhood, where Guerin’s grandfather once worked as a tailor.

“In the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was a place for families of color to shop. My family could not shop downtown; we had to come to Central City,” she said. “Understanding the history of this neighborhood was a turning point for why we wanted to come here.”

Around the country, these new bakeries are becoming hubs of connection, creating a sense of place in the isolated post-COVID era. They are packed with families, retirees grabbing breakfast and, yes, Gen Zers who recently saw a croissant riff on Instagram. But, unlike so much else on social media, they can go somewhere in their hometown, IRL, and enjoy it.

Yee, of Bakers Bench, has all her bakers work a shift at the counter. “When I worked at the kiosk and the alarm went off at 4 a.m., I’d think: Why am I doing this? I’m so tired,” she said.

“And then I’d open the kiosk and a line of people had been waiting all week, saying things like, ‘We brought you flowers; we think it’s your birthday.’ When you get to experience that enthusiasm, it keeps your love of baking alive.”