It’s 6 p.m. on a bitingly cold Saturday in Bed-Stuy. The sun’s disappearing behind the brownstones, the street darkens, and the cheery green storefront of Welcome Home Bakery, sitting smilingly on the corner of Bedford and Green Avenue, glows.
Its gates not yet drawn for the night, huge windows betray tangerine stools stacked on the counter, one baker preparing tomorrow’s focaccia, and another working on a pain au raisin experiment. Owners Isa Steyer, 31, and Billy Wright, 28, are resting their feet for the first time today, chatting with a neighborhood regular known to stick around and shoot the breeze.
“These are the best people in the world. They are, they really are. They are so giving. They’re a plus for the neighborhood,” the customer calls back, making his way toward the door.
For a bakery that only opened this past December, it already feels like a fixture of the neighborhood. And that’s no accident—from the moment the owners crossed professional paths at L’Appartement 4F, a shared commitment to world-class baking, fair wages, and working conditions almost instantly inspired them to begin dreaming up a utopian pastry outpost of their own.
Before Welcome Home, Steyer bounced between careers. In 2020, she worked as a press secretary for the presidential campaign of her uncle, Tom Steyer. But politics wasn’t for her—after Steyer dropped out of the race, Isa felt she had nothing to show for the work aside from some very comfortable Steyer 2020 sweatshirts. That summer, she began working on a mobile app for Too Good to Go, a start-up aimed at combating retail food waste. She met with nearly five hundred small business owners in New York City, many of whom were struggling to keep their businesses open.
Photo by Georgie McKeon
“I saw the drive that they had to keep their dreams alive,” Steyer recalled. “I realized that I had a similar drive, I just needed somewhere to place it.”
The only thing Wright knew about his post-collegiate life was that he wanted to do something on his own. He started baking bread at home while studying journalism at the University of Georgia. After graduating, Wright began working at bakeries in Atlanta and running his own bread delivery service on the side. It was during his delivery days that Wright perfected the recipe for his Rosemary Grit Bread, now a staple of the Welcome Home menu.
When they met in 2023, Wright was Head Baker at the perpetually viral Brooklyn Heights patisserie of tiny croissant cereal fame. Steyer had stopped by the bakery to visit a former colleague, and was so struck by her visit, she traded in her job managing a sales team of fourteen for an apron and began working front of house at 4F.
It wasn’t until Steyer was managing the launch of 4F’s wine bar and bistro, and they had to share a small closet to store and sort weekly deliveries, that they began to really get to know each other. Passing hours together in the closest of quarters, the future business partners pretty quickly aligned Steyer’s obsession with bread and sharing meal with others and Wright’s drive to run his own business after five years of baking for others.
From the beginning, Steyer and Wright agreed on their core values. Informed by their own experiences working in bakeries and the service industry, they wanted to open a place centered around the fair treatment of its employees. Ensuring fair wages in the bakery’s pay structure was non-negotiable. At Welcome Home, back of house staff (bakers and porters) and front of house staff share equally in the tip pool. This isn’t the norm at most bakeries, but it mitigates the pay gap and allows each of Welcome Home’s employees to earn a livable wage.
“We work a really labor-intensive job, with long hours, here on our feet all day. It’s nice to be able to make sure that the people you are working with get the treatment they deserve,” Steyer reflected.
Daniele’s Pepper and Olive Pane (Photo by Georgie McKeon)
Other requisites included a flexible menu, offering bakers the creative freedom to tinker and test their ideas, and fair pricing, ensuring their pastries were accessible to the neighborhood. For Steyer and Wright, it was important to open a space that’s part of the community; that facilitates genuine connections between neighbors through great food and good humor.
Once the vision was clear, Steyer and Wright were off to the races. Steyer left 4F in May 2024 and spent the summer setting up yet another big launch. The newly minted business partners hosted bake sales in Fort Greene park, testing recipes and gauging interest. Meanwhile, they scouted locations, looking for a neighborhood without a bakery. An idiosyncratic real estate broker kept bringing them back to the former site of a seafood store with two huge windows that captured enough sunlight to make them look past its irreparable floors. They signed the lease on June 21st.
On July 10th, they launched a Kickstarter for their project, offering rewards ranging from branded aprons and tote bags to a game night hosted by Steyer and catered by Wright. On September 8th, the project was funded successfully with $61,404 raised towards equipment purchases, renovations, and that crucial ideal of a livable wage structure. In October, Wright follows Steyer and leaves L’Appartement 4F.
Throughout the process, Steyer was documenting the day-to-day realities of bringing the bakery to life on Instagram. One post detailed the time, care, and neck-aching labor that went into tiling the floor themselves. Another revealed the beginnings of the bakery’s exterior mural, which was painted by an employee at Opie’s Outpost, the pet boarding service next door.
“It felt really important that everyone knew that we were putting in the hours to make this thing a reality. I never want [Welcome Home] to have an ‘unattainably cool vibe’ or for people to think they’re not meant to be here,” Steyer explained.
While neighbors and passersby seemed excited about the new bakery on the block, Wright and Steyer had no idea what kind of turnout to expect on opening day. They spent hours observing foot traffic on the corner, but it was hard to gauge what would draw people to that spot while it was still unoccupied.
When the gates lifted at 8 a.m. on December 14th, 2024, there was already a line wrapped around the block braving frigid weather. The oven broke one hour before opening, and was only half-functional throughout the day. Steyer’s parents handed out hot chocolate to those waiting patiently in the cold, and Wright’s parents helped do the dishes. They were selling items as fast as they could be pulled from the oven, slinging croissants and baguettes directly into the hands of customers, most of whom reported they lived within just a few blocks of the bakery.
The opening weeks are a bit of a blur for the whole team—Wright would arrive every day at 4 a.m. and leave no earlier than 8 p.m. for eight weeks straight. The bakery wasn’t fully staffed until the last week of February, and it pulled in partners, family, and friends to help meet the surprising demand
Five months since cracking the gates for the first time, the neighborhood seems as excited as it was on day one. On any given morning or afternoon, two-thirds of the bakery’s clientele are returning customers. Among the most popular items on the menu are the pig-in-Bed-Stuy (ground pork spiced with fennel, cayenne, and maple, nestled in croissant lattice-work), the potato-ranch danish, and the generously frosted cinnamon roll (which was recently lauded as the city’s finest). When sandwiches debut on the menu—like their mortadella and stracciatella layered between slices of focaccia and decorated with lemon, pistachios, and pepperoncini—they sell out within minutes.
Wright and Steyer can feel the bakery becoming the place they set out to open. Their bakers are getting to play around with their own respective recipes, and customers are seeing items dreamt up by the staff—like Kory’s Olive Oil Cake, Daniele’s Pepper & Olive Pane, and Jordan’s Almond Joy—appear on the counter. Wright now comes in at 7 a.m., and when she greets customers, Steyer stands beneath a plaque, depicting the draft card of her great-grandfather, a Galician immigrant who moved to Bed-Stuy in 1906 and lived at 711 Gates Avenue (just a mile from the bakery).
It reads, “Like Isa (and Billy), his employer was also—himself. Welcome Home!”
The post How to Open Your Dream Bakery According to Welcome Home’s Isa Steyer appeared first on BKMAG.
