When breakfast eatery The Wooden Spoon abruptly lost its baker three and a half years ago, owner Tina Yake had two choices: scramble to find a replacement, or roll up her sleeves and handle the baking herself.
She chose the latter.
“We tried going with other bakeries, but it wasn’t the kind of bread I like,” she recalled. “Every baker has their own twist on things, right?”
Today, what started as a stopgap solution has evolved into The Perfect Crumb. The bakery now serves farmers markets, wholesale clients and a growing base of loyal customers.
Later this year, the bakery will enter a new chapter: one with customers stopping in to ogle cases of baked goods. The bakery will open in a new brick-and-mortar spot in Overland Park, near The Wooden Spoon’s flagship location.
The Perfect Crumb is coming to 11809 College Blvd.
- The bakery is coming into a space just off College Boulevard and Quivira Road, near Ricco’s Italian Bistro and across the street from Johnson County Community College.
- The space has previously housed a number of tenants, including a catering company and Japanese restaurant Ichiban Sushi.
- Regular hours for the new bakery have yet to be finalized.
The Perfect Crumb serves artisan breads and pastries
The bakery is known, in large part, for its loaves of sourdough.
The new space will offer that sourdough in various forms, from loaves to English muffins. Customers can also expect other items, like maple wheat marble bread and cinnamon rolls.
As The Perfect Crumb has grown, Yake has aimed to deepen ties with local producers and experimented with how flour quality affects bread.
The variety featured at the store, Yake said, will cater to customers looking for “natural” baked goods. With locally sourced unbleached flour and lots of options for gluten-free and vegan eaters, her bakery has a big focus on keeping things fresh and clean.
“With a lot of bakeries since COVID shutting down, there has been a need for good homemade, no-preservative kinds of bread,” she said. “That’s what we take pride in; none of our products have any chemicals.”
Yake is not new to the food industry
Yake opened The Wooden Spoon’s College Boulevard location, just a few doors down from where The Perfect Crumb will be, roughly 15 years ago.
The breakfast eatery’s second location followed seven years later, at 4671 Indian Creek Parkway.
Yake said The Perfect Crumb started out as a way to keep The Wooden Spoon stocked with baked goods. But when its following began to spread beyond the restaurant’s customers, The Perfect Crumb began showing up at the Lenexa Farmers Market and online farmers market Market Wagon.
The Perfect Crumb also now has a variety of local wholesale clients — one of which is locally owned Franklin General Store in Shawnee.
The steady growth, plus the constraints of needing more baking space, ultimately pushed Yake toward opening a dedicated bakery space.
“Our following has just been growing,” Yake said. “I’m working with 72 square feet — a little tiny for what we’re doing.”
For Yake, none of this — not the restaurant, not the bakery — was part of the plan. It came into view organically, when her coworkers first nudged her into catering back in her corporate world days.
After she was laid off from that job, her husband, Wayne Yake, went door to door looking for business and landed a catering contract with Farmers Insurance. The Wooden Spoon was initially born out of a need for more kitchen space for that venture.
But it became much more than that, thanks to customers who knew how to show Tina the ropes.
“I had never worked in a restaurant, I had no idea how to run it,” she recalled. “Luckily, we had a lot of customers that were in the industry that were like, ‘Come here. Let me show you how this works.’”
Today, looking at “gigantic” mixers for the new bakery she never intended to open, it’s baffling to Yake to think just how far that support had gotten her.
“It was kind of neat that I had the community behind me,” she said about her early restaurant days. “The rest, pretty much, is history — just a lot of people teaching me.”
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