Bakeries will humble a restaurant guy in a hurry. After 45 years in the business, I figured food was food and I could learn the rest. Then I found myself surrounded by pastry flour, yeast, butter, and people talking about lamination, and I realized I didn’t know squat.

I was in love with bakeries long before I owned one. When I was a kid, a trip to Blue Ribbon Bakery in Hattiesburg for rainbow cookies was a big deal. Jody’s Bakery here in town still makes them from the original recipe, and they’re every bit as good as I remember. I’ve been loyal to bakeries most of my life.

Loblolly Bakery celebrated its third anniversary last week. For more than 20 years, I wanted to own a bakery. Had someone handed me a legal pad back then and told me to dream big, I never would’ve imagined what has happened in that old bank building on Hardy Street.

Restaurants and bakeries are in the same business, but they’re different worlds. A restaurant line gives a cook room to work by feel. A bakery gives you a scale and tells you to quit freelancing. Baking is chemistry. Things are weighed to the gram. A cook can taste, adjust, and keep moving. Bakers don’t get that freedom.

Martha Foose was there at the beginning and helped us get the doors open. She brought a lot of experience to those early days, and I’m grateful for the part she played in getting Loblolly started.

If I’m grading our first year, we were probably a C+. That wasn’t on the team. Most of that was probably a lack of leadership on my end. Donald Bender, our head bread baker, nailed the bread from day one, and he continues to nail it today. The pastry side was another matter.

Croissants have always been one of my favorite things to eat, so I knew we had to get that right. We didn’t. During the second year I brought a consultant in to help us improve. That moved the needle a little bit. Then I brought in Caleb, the head baker at La Boulangerie Bakery— my croissant gold standard in New Orleans— to work with our team. He made several trips up. That changed things.

Last year, while eating a croissant at La Boulangerie, it struck me that ours at Loblolly is now better.

That was a fine day.

Not long after that, The New York Times included Loblolly on its list of 22 of the best bakeries in America. For a bakery that hadn’t even been open two years, the team and I were ecstatic.

Cakes were still whipping us. 

My daughter got married during all of this, and her wedding cake was one of the most impressive I’d ever seen. I usually skip wedding cake because most look better than they taste. This one was different. It was outstanding—moist, not overly sweet, and about as good a cake as I could remember eating.

I called Jarred, our COO, and asked, “Who made that cake?”

“Kerrin Hightower.”

“Get me her number.”

Within a few weeks, Kerrin was working with us. Our cake game 10Xed.

Then came the cinnamon rolls. Garret Marlin, our general manager, and Kerrin attacked that problem. I’m a sweet-roll guy almost as much as I’m a croissant guy, and ours weren’t anywhere close to where I wanted them. They were too dense, too hard, and didn’t have enough filling. They were OK, and OK has never interested me much when it comes to food.

For almost two years the team kept working, adjusting the dough and trying again. Over the past few months, I believe we’ve finally gotten the cinnamon roll where it needs to be. 

King cakes have been their own adventure. Most I had eaten over the years were dry, overly sweet, and covered in hard icing. If there was filling, it was usually that gelatinous fake fruit filling like they use in jelly donuts. If we were going to make king cakes, they needed to be ones I actually wanted to eat.

The first Mardi Gras season we made them out of the Midtowner kitchen because Loblolly wasn’t open yet. The next season we were making 30 or 40 a day, and I’d give those a B or B-minus. The following year things started clicking. The King Cake Mafia and other social media accounts took notice. This past Mardi Gras season we added wholesale accounts and pop-ups, and on a few days we made 500 or 600. Next Mardi Gras we may triple that.

None of this happened because I suddenly learned how to become a baker. I didn’t. My contribution is simple. I know what I want things to taste like, and I usually know when something isn’t there yet.

The people who come in during the wee hours, weigh the flour, laminate the dough, shape the bread, decorate the cakes, and work the ovens have made Loblolly what it is. Then they come back the next day and do it all over again.

Donald and Gannon have been there from day one. Garret leads the operation. Kerrin transformed the cake program and helped push the cinnamon rolls forward. Rachel and her team are killing it in the pastry room. Jarred and our leadership team have supported the bakery as it has grown. These days there is somebody in that building most of the day and most of the night.

We’ve gotten more attention in three years than I ever expected. I’m proud of that. But I also know who did the work.

The story of Loblolly is team, team, team. Not Robert.

Our company’s core values are hospitality, quality, consistency, cleanliness, and community. It’s easy to make something great once. The hard part is making it great again tomorrow morning. We’ll never reach perfection. But aiming at it every day sure beats settling for good enough.

Bakeries also create an unusual kind of loyalty. I should’ve known because I’ve been that kind of bakery customer all my life. People have their loaf of bread, their pastry, their Saturday morning routine. They expect it to be just as good as last week.

Our guests stuck with us when we were a C+. They came back as we got better. They told their friends. They bought the bread, ordered the cakes, stood in line for king cakes, and gave us the chance to keep improving.

Someday, hopefully a long time from now, I’ll be sitting in a rocking chair looking back over a career spent in this fraternity of masochists we call the restaurant business. Somewhere near the top of the list will be what a group of fine people did with an old bank building on Hardy Street. They turned it into a bakery better than anything I could’ve dreamed.

And somewhere in Hattiesburg, maybe there’s a kid who thinks a trip to Loblolly for a cookie, croissant, or cinnamon roll is a very big deal. Fifty years from now, maybe that kid will still remember it the way I remember those rainbow cookies from Blue Ribbon Bakery.

If that happens, we’ll have done something right.

Onward.