Courtesy Bloom Bake Shop
Annemarie Maitri and Mark Pavlovich in front of the Bloom Bake Shop.
Annemarie Maitri and Mark Pavlovich, bakers and co-owners of Bloom, in front of the Monroe Street bakery.
Bloom Bake Shop is coming full circle. The bakery at 1851 Monroe St., known for its cakes, breads, croissants, quiches, vegan and gluten-free options, will be opening a cafe in the now-vacant Crescendo Espresso Bar space next door at 1859 Monroe St. Crescendo’s owners closed that space in July to concentrate on their Hilldale location.
Bloom closed its dining room at the beginning of the pandemic, soon converting the space to production — “which we truly needed pre-pandemic anyway,” says Annemarie Maitri, who owns the bakery with her husband, Mark Pavlovich. “We re-wrote the business plan.” Her training and Pavlovich’s had been primarily in bread and viennoiserie (a kind of pastry) and while they had wanted to expand that side of the business, there had not been any room.
They bought more equipment, including a used three-deck steamer, and a sheeter for croissant dough — and added a takeout window.
Maitri remembers the dark day of March 16, 2020, when she had to lay off Bloom’s entire staff and “wondered, as the rest of the world, what was going to happen.”
Within 10 days, her daughter, then a high school senior, built the bakery a Square site for online sales. “We had never had an online platform before that,” Maitri says. At first it was just Maitri’s immediate family — Mark and the three children — running the bakery. Then she began calling back staff who felt comfortable returning.
The willingness of her longtime employees to come back to work “shifted everything for me in terms of who Bloom is. It is a privilege to have people love what you do in the same way [you do].” Bloom provides a 401K for full-time employees because “we want to provide that financial security. But it is more than that,” says Maitri. “When you show up to work, you want to be inspired, you want to grow, you want creativity. In any workplace, that’s what keeps people.”
As the pandemic eased, Bloom brought back more menu items in a limited deli format, but still as takeout. It worked beautifully, she says. But something was missing.
“Customers would ask, are you going to bring the cafe back? It couldn’t happen in this space, because we invested quite a bit to become who we are now,” says Maitri. Then Cait Shanahan of Crescendo approached Maitri to see if she might be interested in taking over that space.
“The wheels started turning,” says Maitri. She wanted to bring back a dine-in area “for the neighborhood that showed up every week, and embraced every form we had during the pandemic. I loved the idea of them in a dining room, engaging over a longer moment than just [our] handing off the bag of treats.” But it’s also for the bakery’s team, and “everybody is excited.”
The cafe will be a separate entity — they won’t be knocking down any walls — and customers will still be able to buy items to-go at the bakery counter. They will be branching out into making different types of pastry that wouldn’t be as appropriate as take-home baked goods — more sit-down types of desserts. She also foresees sandwiches, quiches, soups, “long-cooked stews, cozy one-bowl dishes, and salads that could make a meal,” but says the menu is “really evolving.”
There are also plans for a back patio — a rare commodity on Monroe Street.
Maitri hopes construction on the new Monroe Street cafe will begin later this month for a late winter/early spring opening, though the availability of materials could alter that timeline.
Maitri started Bloom Bake Shop in Middleton in 2010, opening the Monroe Street location in 2017. The Middleton shop underwent some changes, closing in 2018. Bloom also sells at the Monroe Street Farmers’ Market and through the Bloom Bus. Maitri is also a partner in a new project at North Street and Commercial Avenue with Young Blood Beer Company and Cafe Domestique; staff will bring baked goods and sandwiches to the Eken Park location (expected to open later this fall) from Monroe Street. She describes the new space as sunny and “loungey” and she is excited about the space’s potential as a community gathering space.
Fostering community is important to Maitri. Earlier this year she opened the Monroe Street bakery for a series of “Tiny Bakery” concerts; she brought the Bloom Bus to Wingra Park on Tuesdays at 6 a.m. to promote Wingra Boats and paddling as good exercise; and she helped organize “Music by the Water” in Wingra Park last summer. “It did not feel like work. It was just a few emails and everybody showed up and did their part.”
This sounds like a lot of irons in the fire, but Maitri operates on what feels right as well as her business sense. Going back to a cafe on Monroe Street, she says, “feels like we’re coming home.”
