By CHERYL ROMANO/YachatsNews.com
WALDPORT — If there’s a heaven for tastebuds, the pearly gates of yumminess might open into a former plumbing supply warehouse in Waldport.
That’s where devoted customers form long lines each week to snap up handcrafted specialty breads, buttery pastries and sinfully good cakes and pies at Pacific Sourdough bakery.
In a 15-by-20-foot space on Northeast Mill Street, locals and tourists find artisanal baked goods from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays — except Thanksgiving week when it is open just Wednesday. That’s when the retail space of the popular business opens to the public, as it has since 2012. For the remainder of their week, the owners and eight staffers are busy working to service both retail and wholesale customers, baking, making deliveries, cleaning and prepping.
“I look at the line of people out the door and think, ‘How did this happen? I’m pretty astonished,’” says co-owner Katie McNeil.
McNeil and her husband, Mike Smith, started small in the 1990s, with McNeil making bread and selling wholesale pastries out of a building that Smith constructed next to their Waldport home. They moved to a booth at the Newport Farmer’s Market, where they soon had to shift spots because their line of customers was obstructing other vendors.
From home to industrial space
“We were working out of our house, and one day the Salishan Lodge in Gleneden Beach called and asked us to bake 100 loaves a week for them,” McNeil said. “A week later they upped the order to 325 loaves.”
That kind of demand set the couple on a search for more room, and they landed in their current 1,200-square-foot industrial space on Mill Street. It had served as a storage facility for Alsea Bay Granite, which still maintains its retail operation next door. Smith, who was formerly in construction, renovated to accommodate Pacific Sourdough’s baking needs.
“People wonder where we do our baking — this is it,” says McNeil.
Soon after, the two opened an adjacent retail operation at the same location in what used to be a plumbing supply office.
“Since then, we’ve had to remodel the front space three times to meet customer demand and all the things we want to sell,” reports McNeil.
McNeil and Smith have toyed with the idea of expanding into a still bigger space, but decided against that.
“The bakery is near our home; I can walk to work if I want to, and we’re so close to the port and all the cool activities there,” McNeill said.
The well-traveled couple closes shop each January.
“It’s the European model — people do it all over the world,” she said. “Plus, everyone goes on a diet in January and our business drops precipitously for a few weeks then.”
They’ve used the break in the past to explore Mexico, Vietnam, the Swiss Alps, Japan, France and Italy.
“It’s an excellent way to see how the rest of the world runs bakeries,” she says.
In fact, it was a trip to Italy that spurred McNeil to start offering Italian almond cake, so popular it has its own Pacific Sourdough gift website. This year’s destination is Portugal, where McNeil will research local baked goods.
“Then my diet starts when we get back,” she said.
Made from scratch, “real ingredients”
The secret of Pacific Sourdough’s success is simple, but not easy.
“Everything is made from scratch,” explains McNeil.
“We use real ingredients —real butter, fresh eggs, and we make our goods by hand in small batches.”
No preservatives or artificial ingredients are used. As you’d expect from the shop name, natural leavened sourdough breads are a quick-moving staple among the offerings. While many pastries are determined by seasonal fruit availability, McNeil said, “You’ve got to have blueberry scones and chocolate cakes on hand all the time.”
There’s also a focus on shopping for organic, regional and local goods. Most of the shop’s flour is supplied by a small-farm co-op in eastern Oregon and Washington; nuts, spices and seeds come largely from a farmer in the Willamette Valley.
“I bake what I like,” says McNeil.
She started baking as a child. Her mother, who baked and made sourdough bread, told a young McNeil, “You can do whatever you want in the kitchen as long as you clean up afterwards.” At the age of 12, she and a friend made chocolate eclairs for six weeks one summer and gave them away to the neighbors.
“It was a fun science experiment,” she remembers.
Later in life, McNeil worked as a cook at the former LaSerre restaurant in Yachats. That’s where she met Smith, when he was on a visit to the Oregon coast and decided to stay.
“One thing led to another,” and now they’ve been married for more than 30 years.
She’s quick to credit the entire employee team for Pacific Sourdough’s popularity.
“It’s not just me and Mike — it’s everybody. Almost everyone except Nic Agoff, our professional breadmaker, are people we have trained who were already passionate cooks and bakers; we’re so lucky to have the staff that we do. We bring great joy to our stuff.”
Make people happy
“When people leave here, they are happy; they’ve got something yummy to eat,” McNeil said. “Maybe it reminds them of something their grandmother used to make or a cultural heritage item they haven’t found anywhere else.”
One such customer returned from a trip to Greece with tsoureki, a traditional Easter bread and asked if she could duplicate it. McNeil did during the shop’s 2019 pandemic closure.
That period of lockdowns and restrictions really demonstrated to McNeil and Smith how devoted their customers are.
While the shop was generally closed during 2020, it did take online orders and let people come by to pick up their goods.
“People told us over and over during the shutdown, ‘We’re so glad you’re here … you got us through the pandemic. Picking up our orders was the highlight of our week.’ ” McNeil said, stunned by the community support when 200 people a week showed up.
That kind of devotion often provokes a question: why isn’t the shop open more days, more hours?
Because artisanal baked goods takes time, McNeil says. The breads take 36 hours to rise; cookie dough needs to be made in advance; prepping, baking and cleaning are daily chores to keep the display cases stocked with at least 30 choices — not counting the eight to 10 goodies in the cooler.
As it is, between baking for and delivering to some select wholesale customers, plus retail business, McNeil and Smith are lucky to get a day off on Sundays or Mondays although paperwork and shopping for ingredients often intrude.
Still, running tastebud heaven is its own reward. Echoing what many customers say about the bakery’s goods, McNeil says the work is “satisfying and wonderful.”
- Cheryl Romano is a Yachats freelance reporter who contributes regularly to YachatsNews.com. She can be reached at Wordsell@gmail.com
Pacific Sourdough is the absolute gem of Waldport! Great people providing the community with a great product! We’re lucky to have them.
Most terrific, delicious, best vibe place on the coast. Illustration: during the start of the pandemic, when everything was shut down and there was no flour for sale anywhere, I missed going up to Pacific Sourdough so much. But then I thought, they must have flour. I messaged and asked if I could buy some, and Mike immediately messaged back, “How much do you want?” When I went up there to get it, he handed me a sack and refused to take any cash. “It’s for a fellow baker,” he said. I would have loved them anyway, but that put me over the top.