The cramped two-floor layout at the current location of Juniper, seen here, does not allow Amy Chen and her staff to make bread, which will feature at its forthcoming San Mateo expansion, due to open in 2027.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
Situated on a narrow lot and two floors, the hit San Francisco bakery Juniper Café does not have the ideal layout for making croissants and other laminated pastries. Bakers first cut and roll the dough in a cramped basement kitchen, then, several times a day, pass trays of the unfinished pastries, like a fire brigade, up a narrow flight of stairs. On the main floor, the proofer and ovens share room with the café, forcing bakers to work among the bustle of customers waiting to order and baristas making coffee drinks.
“This place was not supposed to be a bakery that has this volume of viennoisere,” said partner-baker Amy Chen, referring to the laminated pastries that draw long lines around the corner of Polk and Pine streets, where Juniper is located. “We have very, very limited equipment and a very strange layout.”
Chen and her partners will have a chance to expand with a second location of Juniper Café they plan to open in San Mateo in early 2027. Located at 1 North B. St. in the Brickline, a new mixed-use building, the space will be a bit larger than the San Francisco one and will have an open layout on just one floor. That will give the team more room to bake pastries — including the croissants that beat out 13 other top San Francisco bakeries in a recent Chronicle blind tasting. It will also allow them to add something Chen has long dreamed of doing but doesn’t currently have room for: bread.
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“I do love bread,” Chen said. She plans to offer a line of baguettes and naturally leavened sourdough. “It’s a live creature and it’s really fun to work with.”
Juniper was co-founded by the team behind St. Frank, which has multiple locations in the Bay Area. The San Mateo location will mark Juniper’s first expansion.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
Chen joined Juniper Café soon after it opened in 2023. It was a project from the team behind Saint Frank Coffee, a San Francisco roaster Chronicle restaurant critic Cesar Hernandez deemed “exceptional” in the Chronicle’s best coffee in the Bay Area. Saint Frank has three locations in San Francisco and one in Menlo Park. But this is the first expansion of Juniper, part of a wave of top San Francisco bakeries growing throughout the Bay Area, which includes Tartine Bakery recently opening in Mill Valley; croissant favorite Arsicault planning a new location in Palo Alto; and Maison Nico spinning up a shop in San Anselmo.
A former tech worker, Chen, like countless others, got into baking bread during the pandemic. She then attended the San Francisco Baking Institute and briefly had a bread pop-up in her native Taiwan during the pandemic. “This whole journey of being a baker, it started with sourdough, so I really want to get back to that,” she said.
Chen plans to bake some of the breads she sold from the pop-up, such as loaves flavored with pink peppercorn and cheese, as well as olives, lemon and garlic. She is particularly excited about baking baguettes in a slightly more delicate style that she said will be closer to what is made in France than in the Bay Area. The new bakery will use imported French flour and prepare the dough in what Chen calls a more traditional method — rather than shape the loaves the day before, as many bakeries here do, they’ll shape and bake them the same day. Both the flour and method result in a thinner crust, Chen said, rather than one that “scratches the roof of your mouth.”
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The imported flour also imparts a fragrance similar to what emanates from a boulangerie in Paris, Chen said. And rather than baking all the baguettes once, in the morning, as most U.S. bakeries do, Chen hopes to bake them several times a day and sell them warm out of the oven, which is common in France, where “they do eat baguettes like rice in Asia,” Chen said.
Juniper recently won a blind croissant tasting conducted by the Chronicle’s food team.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
Chen already spends a lot of time testing which imported French butter to use in Juniper’s croissants and plans to have a refrigerator full of cultured butters to go with the bread. They will include Bordier from Brittany, a prized, ultrarich table butter that only recently began to be imported into the United States. “It tastes like cheese,” Chen said. “If a friend is in France, I ask them to bring me home a backpack” full of them.
The breads baked in San Mateo will also be sold at Juniper’s San Francisco location. But Juniper has no plans to open elsewhere in the city because of the high competition there, with a new bakery opening practically every month, Chen said.
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“San Francisco almost now has become a bakery capital, thanks to all our predecessors,” she said. “If there was no Tartine, no Arsicault, no Acme Bread, we wouldn’t be here.”