Hot And Rising – Shawn Walker-Smith’s Tart! Bakery

Originally posted on January 21, 2015

Welcome to a new segment of the Oakland Bakes blog – Hot and Rising - wherein we’ll be chatting with and learning about the newest, best and brightest food makers and bakers Oakland has to offer.

I honestly couldn’t ask for a better first interview than the one I had with Tart! Bakery’s Shawn Walker-Smith. If you want the certainty that your morning pastries and specialty sweets are made by a person who cares about from where their ingredients are sourced, infuses all of their creations with a positive “Bring it on!” attitude and is seriously invested in Oakland’s growing and thriving food community, Shawn is your baker.

While his most popular specialty offerings regularly include pies and scones, Shawn revealed that when he opened Tart! Bakery three years ago, it was initially going to be all about – you guessed it – tarts. “Tarts were going to be my thing,” he tells me. “That was going to be the bedrock on which everything else would be built. And, as life will have want to do, it’s completely gone in all kinds of different directions!”

He's currently focusing his attention on getting creative with verines (which I had no idea existed until I watched Shawn make one and had the pleasure of ingesting very rapidly because it was so good that I actually couldn't stop shoving it into my face).

“Verine is a fancy-pants term for parfait,” he explains. “I love the idea that they’re small and they’re portable and they look great, but also present the opportunity for all of these different things you can do – the hot and the cold, and the crunchy and the smooth in one little plate. And then finding different flavor combinations that stand on their own, but are also really interesting when they’re taken together… or how maybe the bottom half can be a completely different experience than maybe the top two layers – and that challenge is really intriguing and compelling to me right now.”

Along with keeping up with the hot innovations he comes across on Pinterest and Instagram and spinning them into his own new delicious concepts, Shawn finds inspiration with ease in his ingredients. Purchasing fresh produce locally from the Sunday Jack London Square Farmers Market in Old Oakland, the Sunday market in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, or everyone’s favorite East Bay grocery store, Berkeley Bowl, his creations are largely influenced by “the whole broad what’s-going-on-at-the-farmers-market, what’s in season, what smells interesting, what tastes like ‘Wow, this is really fun!'”

At the end of the day, however, Shawn recognizes that baking delicious treats and feeding people all over the Bay Area isn’t all fun and games. “There are a couple of challenges,” he admits. “Really having the patience to believe in the process and know that it will happen... maybe not tomorrow, which is killing me... but to keep my eye on the prize and not get so frustrated that I’m paralyzed and can’t move it forward.”

He adds that “There’s the challenge of time management, the balance of doing what I think is required to make the business move forward and balance that with my family commitments. I’m really lucky –  my family’s been so supportive, and both of my boys are incredibly amazing in their own unique, fantastic ways – they’re very inspiring. My husband and I say this on a regular basis - We’re really lucky!” He laughs and says, “The business and the kids, they’re like two separate sets of teenagers!”

On the other hand, coupled with an increased sense of his own talents and abilities, Shawn has enjoyed finding himself immersed in such a positive and welcoming Oakland food community. “That, I think, has been in the last three years one of the biggest things that I’ve gotten out of the small business entrepreneur/food business thing, that there’s a lot of us out there who’re doing this thing and we’re doing it primarily because we love it. That was something I honestly don’t think I expected.”

A veteran artisan food maker at local incubator kitchen Kitchener Oakland for the past few years, he goes on to explain that his “experience of it has been [working with] a large group of people who are more than willing to help each other out, and they want to see us all do well… and time and time again the folks that I’ve come into contact with are really disarming with their support and their openness.”

That said, Shawn definitely sees the future of Tart! Bakery blossoming in Oakland. “Where I have to stay focused,” he says, “is on a late night dessert cafe or bistro. That’s where I want to go.  I think the city could support it and it really feels like – why not? That’s the kind of thing Oakland should have! A late night place where, say you’re out at the movies, or you’re going to see a show at the Fox or the Paramount, or maybe you’re having dinner and you want to continue the evening …where do you go after that?”

“A lot of the impetus for that is, when my husband and I were just getting together he lived in the city and I was working in the city and we would spend a lot of time there. We’d go to the theater or hang out with friends, and every night we would always end up at Sweet Inspirations or Sparky’s or someplace like that at 11 o’clock on a school night having a big huge bowl of tea or coffee and a slice of pie, or a slice of cake, or maybe nothing. It’s really that kind of cafe culture, if you will, that I would love to have here. When I lived in France, it was a similar sort of thing.”

So what exactly does this vision for Tart! Bakery, future late night dessert bistro, encompass in Shawn’s eyes? “What if we had somewhere you could go and get flippin’ awesome dessert stuff and some savory on the menu, because it’s later in the evening and it’s always good to have nosh? Somewhere that will focus on digestifs, on dessert drinks, on coffees and teas? We’ve got amazing coffee stuff happening in the East Bay, in Oakland, right now! There’s so much really cool stuff going on – there’s no reason not to highlight all of those! And to have it so it runs a little bit later, so not closing until 3, maybe.”

I’m sold! How many scones, pies, cookies, tarts and verines do I need to buy to make that a reality?

I’ll leave you with these incredibly inspiring words of wisdom from Shawn, an intrepid food entrepreneur who believes not only in making and selling a great product, but also that you can do it, too:

“I’m convinced, for every person who will remind you of all the folks who’ve failed – and we’ve all heard the statistics: This number of businesses fail in the first year, this number of businesses don’t make it past the second year, this number of businesses fold within five years. [They say,] ‘Well, you know the food business is so hard,’ and it’s like, well yeah. And then you have places like La Borenquena that was started by an immigrant woman who really could not speak English and has been in Oakland and running continuously for 43 years. There are a lot of those kinds of stories as well! So there’s every reason it will work, there’s every reason you can do this.”

“It may not happen tomorrow, it probably won’t happen tomorrow, but don’t lose sight of that thing, just go for it. Have faith in the process, have faith in yourself, have faith in the universe and be okay with maybe not getting to exactly where you thought you’d be – but you’re going to be in a really good place. Just say yes!”

You can find Shawn and Tart! Bakery’s offerings every day at the following locations:

• Arbor Cafe – 4210 Telegraph Ave, Oakland
• Red Bay Coffee's Box at the Hive Complex - 2327 Broadway, Oakland
• Kitchener Oakland - 372 24th St, Oakland