They've Got the Goods

Three of Best Pie's offerings, clockwise from top left: peach and blueberry pie, pecan pie, sweet potato pie. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

She knows the drill. For four years Amernick, noted for her finely detailed wedding cakes, rich caramels and perfect doughnuts, operated a bakery near the restaurant. The business was forced to close in September 2000 after the rent's gradual rise from $3,100 to $5,000 per month.

Amernick says it's not enough just to bake great goods: Success requires so much diversification that it practically means you have to open a wine bar in the shop, too. "You have to offer coffee," she says. And "if you don't have something savory, you lose some customers." But most important, Amernick says, "volume is key. People were screaming at us for more doughnuts. We couldn't make them fast enough."

Bakers who are jumping into the fray are undeterred by the notion of such challenges -- and confident that the time is right.

Natalia Kost-Lupichuk, who opened Natalia's Elegant Creations in late July in Falls Church, is banking on the fact that she already had wholesale customers in place. She broke into the baking world in summer 2003 selling her homemade pastries at the annual Ukrainian Festival in Silver Spring. Over the next 18 months, she built a successful business, baking her rich nut tortes in a licensed commercial kitchen in her parents' basement in Northern Virginia and selling to Dean & DeLuca in Georgetown and to caterers.

"But it was always in the back of my mind to have a neighborhood bakery with a cozy, warm, elegant atmosphere," says Kost-Lupichuk, who has invested $125,000 in equipment and furnishings. To keep costs down, all of the woodwork, lighting and plumbing was done by her brother, contractor Paul Kost.

She spent a year looking for the site. "I wanted a location near a corner for visibility, one that had ample parking and access to major roads," says Kost-Lupichuk, 36. A former accountant, she has a culinary degree from Boston University and studied hotel restaurant management at James Madison University.

Her intimate shop has six cute tables for two and Old World decor accented by tasseled drapes and paintings of European cafes. Impressive glass-fronted cases are filled with a wide variety of fancy desserts as well as more kid-friendly cupcakes and cookies. The biggest seller is an adorable dark-chocolate "teacup" filled with strawberry mousse that sells for $4.25. The shop also sells three types of sandwiches each day as well as specialty coffees and teas.

"There's an art to fine pastry, and you usually don't see it around Washington," says customer Lynne Gaudreau of Capitol Hill, eating a mini-fruit tart after a lunch at Natalia's with two friends on a recent Saturday. "What you do see is chunky cookies and doughnuts."

Besides cookies and doughnuts, the local baking scene also turns out a lot of chains, including a well-established one that opened a new outlet Saturday. Le Pain Quotidien, a bakery cafe with 90 stores worldwide, opened its first Washington area location in Georgetown. More are scheduled to open in Dupont Circle, Alexandria and Bethesda in the next year.

At least one prominent baker blames such chains -- and one supermarket company -- for what has been a lackluster local bakery scene. Mark Furstenberg, who brought premium breads to town in July 1990 with his Marvelous Market and later with Breadline, both of which he has sold, says the arrival in 1991 of Fresh Fields, which was later bought by Whole Foods Market, discouraged bakery-owner hopefuls.

"They soaked up the wealthy consumers with their in-store bakery, and they don't buy from the small local bakers," says Furstenberg. At the same time, the rapid growth of not only Marvelous Market but local chains such as Firehook Bakery and Uptown Bakers "doomed some small bakeries and discouraged others to follow," he says.

Sarah Kenney, spokeswoman for Whole Foods in the mid-Atlantic, says individual stores are free to buy from local bakers, but the only example she could cite of one actually doing so was the Alexandria Whole Foods, which stocks Firehook bread. She says small shops might not make as much money at Whole Foods as at a farmers market, where they sell directly to consumers: "In many cases it doesn't make financial sense to sell to us." She adds, "We'd be interested in checking these [new] places out for ourselves."