Winning Recipe

Old Town Bakery is baking up delicious treats at the corner of Eaton Street and Grinnell Street. LONA HALL / COURTESY PHOTO

Old Town Bakery is somewhat of an anomaly in Key West. In a town filled with inflated advertising budgets, the bakery does little to no marketing.

The bakery eschews any digital presence except for a simple website and online recommendations are driven entirely by a solid base of returning customers, praising its acclaimed menu.

Owner Niall Bowen initially followed the traditional playbook for generating exposure when he opened Old Town Bakery with his wife Elzbieta Krysztofiak in 2010.

“I found the whole effort to be expensive, time-consuming, and virtually untrackable. I am sure some of it helped to make people aware of us, but I couldn’t tell you which part worked and which part had no effect at all,” Bowen says of marketing.

As marketing trended online, he wondered whether he could run the business without posting an unending glossy stream of food photos.

Instead, He opted for a pared-back strategy driven by the quality of his products and the zeal of buyers.

In letting go, Old Town Bakery found its momentum.

Bowen, originally from Boston, has professionally baked for over 30 years. This included restaurants, events connected to the Olympics and Brunei royalty, and even Key West’s Louie’s Backyard, where he met his wife while working as the pastry chef (and helped assemble their cookbook).

While the enterprise faces challenges, such as tight margins, early mornings, and a tricky labor pool, Bowen and his team have created one of the top breakfast spots and bakeries in Key West. Croissants, fruit Danish muffins, scones, sandwiches, and burritos are all top sellers.

“Folks love the OMG brownie. It’s been one of the most popular things we do since the beginning,” Bowen adds.

Everything at Old Town Bakery is made in house. LONA HALL / COURTESY PHOTOS

Of course, everything is made in-house and has ardent followers. Even the chocolate chip cookies that personally turned me on to the bakery are said to have a small but very enthusiastic fan club.

When Bowen first started the business, he could count on one hand the number of places in town that did scratch baking. There are a lot more now. He is a fan of some, including Moondog Café and their cannelles.

One item Old Town Bakery no longer sells is bread. Bowen has no interest in being a bread bakery.

“We bake bread only for our sandwiches now, with the exception of baguettes,” he explains. “Those we sell. People don’t know it, but scratch bread by the loaf is essentially a loss leader for a business like ours. Unless you have cheap rent and cheap labor like some of the big manufacturers on the mainland, the more bread you sell by the loaf, the less profitable you are as a business.”

In keeping with his streamlined operations, Bowen uses old-school equipment: a 1950s balance scale for ingredients and a Hobart mixer from the late 1960s or early 1970s. The latter was retrieved from the former Key West High School before it was torn down.

“I was trained with old equipment like that, and I’m most comfortable working with it rather than digital scales and more modern stuff,” Bowen says.

Old Town Bakery owner Niall Bowen with some of his popular baked goods.

A few podcasts and loud rock and roll make the baker’s 2 a.m. shifts go by faster. While his top albums rotate on any given day, he is confident that “EVOL” by Sonic Youth and “Europe ‘72” by Grateful Dead would be in the mix—”Sketches of Spain” by Miles Davis when he wants jazz.

Bowen has also given much thought to the island’s future. He considers the trends that have stuck since the pandemic, which chiefly impact the costs of labor and rent.

This next version of the island, as I phrased it, is one he does not consider friendly for tradespeople who want to take reasonable risks and launch start-ups similar in scale to his own. Bowen highlighted thee increase in housing expenses and the growing obstacles to small-scale economies, which have traditionally supported the growth of mom-and-pop shops in Key West.

He admitted that his lack of interaction with the social media economy may have left him less informed about opportunities for entrepreneurs.

“But,” he adds, “if you are, like I was, trained in a trade and ready to break out on your own with a project that would benefit from a friendlier commercial rent environment and a deep labor pool to tap, this ‘next version’ doesn’t look very welcoming, to be perfectly honest.”

Bowen opened Old Town Bakery with his wife Elzbieta Krysztofiak in 2010.

He feels that “shoestring” start-ups like his are becoming less common and now often need the support of a financially strong backer.

“Some folks call that progress. That’s just a different way to view it, and depending on what you want your community to look like, it might be the right way. Who am I to say?”

However, the baker is happy to give firm advice on other food-related topics, such as using air fryers for baking.

“Sure, why not?” Bowen says, explaining that an air fryer is just a convection oven. For aspiring air fryer bakers, he suggests trying lean bread and hard rolls. He also says cakes and cookies would need to be closely monitored for temperature because the intensity of the fan could result in burning.

“The whole thing is just about trial and error until you get something you like. I’m sure there are many people out there baking great things in air fryers.”

Bowen’s operation at Old Town Bakery is a well-oiled machine, but he has had baking hiccups in the past.

“I almost burned down the Pier House once with a pot of Marron glace cooking overnight. Does that count as a mishap?” he laughs.

Maybe. But it is almost immediately offset by his success at creating one of the island’s top food destinations. ¦

OldTownBakeryKeyWest.com
Old Town Bakery | 930 Eaton

The post Winning Recipe first appeared on Key West Florida Weekly .