The Starter Never Dies

I didn’t necessarily expect to make a life in the culinary world.
After growing up in Miami, I moved to Chicago to study music business. I came back for the summer when I was 19 and got my first job in the industry: bar and dessert at Gigi. I was terrible and it was brutal. I didn’t have the speed or urgency required to handle plating all the desserts and making all the drinks in the restaurant. But I really did enjoy the dessert part of the job. The pastry chef would show me each morning how she wanted me to present each plate and I would feel really proud of my work, often posting pictures of plates to the new app “Instagram”.

I spent the rest of my college years working at a catering company in Chicago before moving back to Miami and having a good go at making a life in the music industry. I was an intern at the III Points office, worked production at the New World Symphony Center, and later moved to New York to work at a booking agency.

The baking bug got me while I was at the Symphony Center. One night after a late event, I ended up on the Wikipedia page for the shortbread cookie. The first line of the page was “a traditional Scottish biscuit usually made from one part white sugar, two parts butter and three to four parts plain wheat flour.” I had all of those ingredients in my pantry in that moment, so I threw spoonfuls of each in a mug, mixed them up, and put the mixture in the oven. To my amazement, what came out was an actual shortbread cookie. I was hooked from then on.

Around that same time, I got obsessed with making matcha cream puffs. It’s a really technically advanced pastry, people spend years getting it right. I tried it one day and completely failed. Tried again the next day. Failed again. I kept trying every day for like four or five days until I finally made one that worked. That moment really stuck with me. I realized I had never wanted something that bad before. Never worked that hard for a result. And that’s when I first thought: maybe I could be a baker one day.
I got my “dream job” at a booking agency in New York but in reality I was getting paid $1,600 for 35 hours a week, living in Brooklyn. That wasn’t going to work. So I picked up a job at a falafel shop while still working at the agency. I was doing four days at the office, two or three at the shop. And at the falafel spot I did everything, front of house, back of house, making food, serving customers. It was probably my first real back-of-house experience. But even then, all I could think about was bread. I wasn’t going out, I wasn’t seeing friends, it was just me and the dough. I was baking sourdough every single day, and while everyone at the office was talking about new albums, I was sitting there thinking about the dough I had in my fridge.

I started selling challahs and babkas I would bake at home. My manager at the falafel shop even sold them at work. I started to realize that I was wasting my time trying to force something that didn’t fit anymore. So I decided to stop fighting against my desire and ride the wave. I quit my jobs to go to bread school in Barcelona.

But before I went to Barcelona, I returned home to Miami for the summer. This was 2019. I went to several bakeries handing out my resume, asking if I could just come in and learn. The only one that said yes was True Loaf in South Beach. I learned so much there. I would work the front in the morning and stay after my shift to learn bread and pastry production. I would take croissant scraps and make babka with them. After several weeks, I convinced the owner, Tomas, to sell babkas at the shop. By the end of the summer I was getting paid to make bread, and it felt amazing.

I learned considerably less in the two-month program I did at the Barcelona Baker’s Guild. For all the theoretical knowledge you can learn in an academic environment, nothing compares to actually working at a bakery every day. And as I realized later, the bakery I had worked at was world-class in terms of quality. The school was very traditional — old-school Catalan techniques. The only thing I really got out of it was learning how to make pan de cristal.

I ended up working at a couple bakeries while abroad, but at this point we were deep in the pandemic. I yearned for my family and friends back home, and True Loaf needed a new baker. Coming back seemed like a no-brainer.

I came back to a job that involved arriving at 4 a.m., doing the morning bake, and mixing all the dough. It took some time to adjust to this level of responsibility, but I managed it. I later got to a point at True Loaf where I was basically living my dream. I was shaping all the bread, and we’d hired someone who I’d taught to do all my mixing. I didn’t even have to come in at 4 a.m. anymore. And best of all, I was making some really incredible products.

One Sunday I went to play soccer, as I was doing every week back then. I got hurt. I felt something in my knee and feared the worst. But I managed to keep playing and figured I had just pulled a muscle, so I went to work as normal the next week. After a couple weeks though, I wasn’t feeling any better. A couple more weeks passed and I was barely limping through my work days. At some point I had to pull up a stool to shape breads, a big no-no in kitchens. After six weeks my dad convinced me to get a scan and I discovered that I’d been working on my feet with a fracture in my knee. My perfect little life was done.

I had to take several months for recovery and physical therapy. Tomas promised me he’d keep my job for me when I recovered, and he was true to his word. I went back to work at the bakery but I could only do a few hours at a time. My body couldn’t handle it anymore. I had to find something else to do, so I did what any Miamian would do in that situation: I got a real estate license.

But as is often the case, it never really worked out for me. I never liked it, and felt embarrassed telling people that I was a realtor. My friends (who were all servers and bartenders and DJs) weren’t exactly lining up to buy a house. I had a couple good months but it was mostly a period of bad financial instability. I still baked bread at home every day, and sometimes I would sell some on my Instagram story when I really needed money.

One day, my friend Callie Pumo (a brilliant baker in Miami) asked me to do a bake sale with her at what was then Paradis. That little event would end up changing my life. After that first pop-up, my friend Ale invited me to sell food at his night at The Corner. This turned into a regular thing. I started getting booked for more and more events. It got to the point where food pop-ups truly became my main hustle. It wasn’t the easiest way to live, but I was doing my own thing on my own terms. The best part of the pop-up life was how deeply I felt connected to my community. I met so many people at events that I worked.

After almost two years of making a living from mostly nighttime events, I found myself really yearning for the bread and pastry that I had spent so many years learning. So when my friend Numan Hall reached out to me about doing something at the vacant Paradis space, I knew it was the perfect opportunity. Together with him and BLK BRW, we were able to put together a collective that made a perfect symbiosis of our various skill sets. A place where the coffee is as important as the pastries, and the food will teach you about places you’ve never heard of. And it’s in the same place where I did that first pop-up with Callie. That’s kinda poetic.

Baking every day has become my rhythm. I love how fermentation transforms the dough without me doing anything, how I can leave something overnight and come back to it completely changed. I think that’s part of why I kept coming back to it. Baking is different. It’s early mornings, not late nights. You’re not surrounded by alcohol or that constant edge of burnout energy kitchens have. I’ve seen cooks rely on things just to get through service, but that would be weird at 6 a.m. in a bakery. When I finish my shift and the sun is still up, I don’t feel like drinking. I just feel calm.
I’ve had the same sourdough starter for seven years now. The person I got it from said it came from France, 200 years ago. I brought it with me to Barcelona and back. People think sourdough is hard to keep alive, but it’s not. It just wants to live.

Cover and food photography by Nick Murray @neauxcream

Interview and black-and-white photos by @hotkstudios