It was Beth Setrakian’s lifelong dream to own a storefront bakery. At her first one, which she opened in Mill Valley in 2011, sales were strong but she learned how tough it is to make a profit while using more expensive organic ingredients.
A resident of Bolinas for 17 years, she moved the operation to her hometown to find a “stronger community feeling.” It doesn’t hurt that Ms. Setrakian, who lives downtown, can easily walk from her home to the Bolinas Community Center, where she bakes her goods, and then to her storefront, Beth’s Community Kitchen, beside the gas station, where she only has a small convection oven.
“It’s sort of how I started in my dorm room with a toaster oven,” she quipped on Monday.
Ms. Setrakian is still committed to continue using quality, organic ingredients. The baked goods on offer Sunday, the soft opening day of her new bakery, pointed to what she said is her ethos and a way to maintain financially stability: keep it simple. Options included a simple yet airy butter croissant and a blueberry bran muffin—a dark, tart treat sweetened only with raisins, so dense and moist it resembled a baked pudding.
She is also selling a soup, sandwich—with focaccia bread she bakes—and salad each day using ingredients from local farms.
Ms. Setrakian grew up in Plainview, Texas. Her mother loved to bake and her father, a professor at an African-American branch of Texas A&M, had a sweet tooth. Her mother made lemon meringue pies, blackberry cobblers, pound cakes and custards.
As a young woman she left Texas to attend Stanford, where she and her friend Judy Rodgers—who would later open the famed Zuni Café—cooked and baked together. She also studied abroad in Florence, Italy, where she got a taste of Italian desserts and munched on regional breads.
With the help of Ms. Rodgers, she snagged her first pastry job at the Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley. (She brought owner Mark Miller a pecan tart, one of her specialties, to sway him.) From there she went to Il Fornaio in 1981, an Italian restaurant that reminded her of her time in Europe.
After she married and became pregnant with her first child, she moved to Stinson Beach and baked pies and pastries for the Olema Inn and bed and breakfasts. Her small family spent a year and a half in Florence, where she taught Stanford students, before she made her way back to Marin and started selling pies and cookies—gingersnaps were a major seller—to restaurants and grocery stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joes. At first she baked out of her home, but her husband balked after their kitchen became caked in sugar when she baked 300 heart-shaped meringues for a San Francisco hotel for Valentine’s Day.
She moved to an incubator kitchen in San Rafael and then to a large commercial one in Cotati, where she baked cookies before she opened her Mill Valley bakery.
In her new spot, she hopes to keep the selection simple and offer desserts, like a custard cup, inspired by her childhood. “I hope to bring back some old-fashioned specialties from growing up,” she said.
Beth’s Community Kitchen current hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday to Monday.