Cruffins and more from Mr. Holmes.
On the day Mr. Holmes Bakehouse opened in late November, a well-known baker walked into the shop to introduce himself to Ry Stephen, co-owner and pastry chef.
“No one knows who you are,” Stephen says the baker told him. “People are asking, ‘Where in the hell did he come from? Did he work at Craftsman? Was he at B? Was he at Thorough Bread? Has he been in the city?’ ”
“I laughed,” Stephen continues, “and said, ‘That’s kind of true.’ ”
Mr. Holmes’ debut, on a nondescript block of Larkin in San Francisco, was practically a Houdini-like reveal, opening with few preview posts in the food media. Two months in, the shop inspires quizzical glances from passersby.
The storefront emits a Caucasian-flesh glow that only intensifies when you step through the door. Inside, the white tiles that cover the floor and walls reflect a pink sign, glowing in neon: “I got baked in San Francisco.”
The phrase appears on Mr. Holmes’ boxes, too, just above its logo: a hand flashing a peace sign. Countless Instagram photos use the sign as a backdrop for closeups of Stephen’s signature “cruffins” — muffin- shaped croissants filled with pastry cream — or cutaways of his California croissant, with nori, ginger and salmon.
In person, Stephen sports not a single visible tattoo and doesn’t hang out at speed metal shows with the pastry chef clique that produces most of the city’s whacked-out viennoiserie. He turns out to be a fineboned strawberry blond with a gentle tenor voice, a soft Australian accent and a propensity for saying nice things about everyone.
The aforementioned baker, for instance, gets props for taking time out of his busy schedule to come visit. The restaurateurs who let him work out of their kitchens before the bakery opened are stand-up guys. Even the city planning and health departments were “just fantastic.”
Before he opened Mr. Holmes, the 27-year-old Australian was indeed a Bay Area unknown, having moved here two years ago with his American-born wife, Keisha. The
couple met in Paris when Stephen, not long out of his cooking apprenticeship in Melbourne, spent two years working at a pastry shop in the 17th arrondissement.
After returning to Melbourne for a spell, the couple hiked it to San Francisco in 2013. When he arrived, he took a few shifts a week behind the espresso machine at Stanza, where he worked for Aaron Caddel, a 21-year-old entrepreneur who had transformed a flailing chocolate shop called Coco-luxe into a thriving Third Wave cafe.
“We got talking one day,” Caddel says, “and I found out that Ry was this prolific pastry chef who had been doing it for 10 years.”
Caddel asked Stephen how much money would it take to start producing pastries for Stanza and other cafes. They batted around figures, then secured a deal with the owner of Hi Lo BBQ in the Mission to use that kitchen to bake muffins, scones and other simple pastries early in the morning.
In the meantime, they worked to acquire a space of their own. Thanks to the city, Caddel and Stephen were able to transform a former convenience store into a fully permitted commercial kitchen and retail shop in five months, allowing them to move out of the now-closed Hi Lo two weeks before the space re-opened as Lazy Bear.
These days, Now securely ensconced on Larkin Street, Stephen starts his 14-hour days at 3 a.m. By 5 a.m., his crew is well into the day’s production. A fleet of scones and muffins has just departed for the 12 cafes that the bakery supplies, and the staff turns its attention
to the pastries sold in the retail case, sprinkling strawberry sugar over “brioche bombs” and filling doughnuts with mocha crème pâtissière.
The kitchen is new and sterile in just the way you’d hope it would be. A Thunderbird Dough Sheeter in the corner operates in full gear, its conveyor belts whisking giant slabs of dough layered with French butter through a roller. So “laminated,” the buttery dough will end up as croissants, danishes and cruffins.
The cruffin, like Stephen’s most elaborate pastries, takes so much work that he will only sell it in his shop. He spent months perfecting the right way to cut, roll and pinch strips of the laminated dough so that the cruffin erupts out of the muffin tin in just the right pouf.
Each cruffin is dusted with sugar and filled with an ever-changing flavor of pastry cream, but what most inspires awe are the layers of flaky dough visible on the exterior, so defined they resemble an aerial view of Vietnam’s terraced rice fields.
Stephen came up with the cruffin in conjunction with the third member of his team: Aron Tzimas, another Melbourne boy whom Stephen befriended after moving to San Francisco.
Tzimas, a graphic designer, is responsible for Mr. Holmes’ odd-bird graphics and raffish Instagram presence. (The bakery’s name comes from yet another source: Stephen’s mother’s cat.) Tzimas also works with Stephen to create pastries, such as the “choux bomb” with almond roca cream and the amelie amann, a buttery Breton pastry filled with rose-scented pistachio paste.
“I might have a thought for a product,” Stephen says. “Aron might steal it and say that he had the idea, and then we’ll both work together on what that could be. Then it’s up to me to see it come to fruition.”
Along with Parisian polish, Stephen and Tzimas are determined to bring the avant-garde spirit of Melbourne’s pastry scene to San Francisco.
“Melbourne is at a point where people can just open up and do whatever they want,” Stephen says. “There’s this real freedom.” San Franciscan pastry stores are still shaking off tradition, he thinks, and local customers are beginning to open up to the possibilities.
Stephen promises that the shop’s inventiveness has barely dawned; as soon as he brings on more staff, he can test out new wild-card pastries for the case and install the equipment to produce chocolates.
He loves to change the way people view pastries, to take them out of their natural habitat. “Pastry,” he says, with an impish earnestness, “should evoke a smile.”