Close observers of the scene in Magnolia Village will have noticed the new rolling-pin logo that has been painted on the window of the Upper Crust Bakery at 3204 W. McGraw St.
Inside, the first thing you notice is a new wooden floor that offsets the freshly painted butter yellow and the honey-colored walls. This is all accented by the sun-dried tomato red trim around the windows and door, and the café-colored ceiling.
"We decided to use all food tones," says Beth Scribner, and she's usually the second thing you notice. The bakery has new owners. Two personable, smiling and competent young women from Ballard are now in control of the only bakery in Magnolia.
Meet Beth Scribner, who runs the front part of the store, and Anna Beard, who's in charge of all the delicious goodies that come out of the back.
Because you usually meet Scribner first, we'll start with her.
She was born in Maine but spent most of her childhood in a small town outside of Philadelphia. She went to Conestoga High School, near Valley Forge, Pa.
While in high school, she lived in Germany as an exchange student. Her first experience with a bakery was when her German host "mom" would go to the bakery every day and buy a half loaf of bread and bring it home. She liked the German pretzels they had, too.
She then got a degree in international relations at Boston University. Her field of study provided a combination of political science, cultural classes plus various language studies that she enjoyed. "I liked the focus on current events that it gave you," she says.
She has a younger brother who lives in Chicago, and her parents now reside in Charleston, S.C., where they own a harbor tour business.
"Because I'd grown up in the East," Beth remarked, "I wanted to live on the West Coast and in a big city. I moved to San Francisco and I met Dan, who I've lived with for 10 years.
"We came to the conclusion that San Francisco was just too expensive. I didn't want to have to get the kind of job I would have had to have in order to survive there. We looked around; we still wanted to be on the West Coast and near the water - I grew up around sailboats. So in 1999, we came here because it was a little more low key, and a little less expensive living.
"I have an aunt on Bainbridge Island," Scribner commented, "and we'd come up to see her. We realized how pretty it was up here.
"When we were still back in San Francisco, Dan and I would go for coffee every morning and I really liked being in the cafés. So I said when we'd decided to move here, 'Maybe I'll get a job as the manager of a coffee shop. And I did!"
Scribner has worked for seven years in the coffee industry as a coffee shop manager and likes both the people part of the job and the organizational part. She especially enjoys making good coffee for people and watching them enjoy it.
"Here, at the Upper Crust, we have a Syneso espresso machine; it's a quality machine that was hand built right here in Seattle. Other good machines come all the way from Italy, but if we ever have a problem with ours, we can get quick service.
"We get our coffee from 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters in Vancouver, B.C. They've developed a real quality espresso blend, and they're really passionate about quality. They're excited that I want to brew good coffee and use their coffee to do so.
"We've a different mindset than the bigger coffee shops," Scribner continued. "We're coming at it with an artisan approach. I try to teach each of the baristas how to understand the coffee and how it works versus how to automate it all so they can have different employees.
"My last job," Scribner told me, "was in a specialty bakery that had a café in it. It was a job opportunity, and I don't think I comprehended what working in a bakery, or the hours, meant until I was there a couple of months.
"It was a specialty bakery, where we made only one thing. It wasn't like this, where we have many products. It was making one thing, over and over. That was how I ended up in it, and that was how I met Anna. I ran the front of the store and Anna ran the back, the bakery production. We hit it off and got along really well."
And this brings us to Anna Beard, who's in charge of all the delicious goodies that come out of the back part of the bakery. Beard was born in San Antonio, Texas, has one sister and a father who was career Air Force. Beard joined the Air Force herself at the age of 19 primarily to pay for college and to see the world.
In the six years she was in the service, she lived in England, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Germany and various bases in the U.S. Schools she went to were Indiana University, the University of Maryland, the Defense Language Institute for languages, the University of Arizona for Near Eastern studies and then Seattle's Art Institute for baking and pastries. She was an Arabic linguist in the Air Force and has studied Arabic, Hebrew, German and Japanese.
Beard met her husband, Mike, in the Air Force on a base in Texas; they've been married five and a half years. After they were discharged and Mike was laid off from his former job, he went to culinary school; he's now the sous-chef at the Pink Door Restaurant in the Market. A year later, Anna went to the Art Institute for baking. Someday they'd like to own their own restaurant.
Besides some of the usual cookies, the Upper Crust now offers a fabulous bread pudding made from cinnamon rolls, fresh fruit tarts, pastry cream tarts and often has fresh pie by the slice. Last week, the Lady Marjorie and I split a piece of dark Washington cherry pie with a hint of clove that was delicious.
"I have a lot of dessert ideas in my head," said Beard, "that will be appearing in the next couple of weeks." Now that the summer is ending and it's getting cooler, a lot of baked chocolate things are promised. "I did a lot of chocolate work with the first pastry chef I worked with, and I studied a lot of chocolate things at school.
"I'm also trying to offer whole-grain options to people so that they get a healthier product. I do pies with whole-wheat pastry crust, plus whole-wheat scones and muffins."
Stop by the Upper Crust the next time you're in the Village and check out the window-pane menu board hanging on the wall. With five kinds of coffee and all the bakery treats, you should find something that will delight your palate.
Both women are avid KEXP radio listeners with Beth singling out
the blues show on Sunday mornings as her favorite. They are both also cat people; Beth lives with Dyna, short for dynamite, and Anna is owned by Pumpkin, an all-black feline. Both women also argue endlessly as to whose cat is cuter; it may have to be finally decided by a "cute-off."
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