Photos by Giant Giants

One morning a few months ago, Alexis Kelleher told her husband and business partner, Nate Rossi, about her focaccia dream. The pillowy bread had risen in her thoughts overnight, so visceral she could smell it baking in her mind.

Her unconscious vision of a dimpled dough glazed with golden olive oil had been a good one. For a while, though, Kelleher—Worcester’s perpetual Star Baker— experienced only nightmares about dough. She felt uncomfortable in her kitchen at Crust, her artisan bakeshop in the city, and spurned her apron. At home, she hadn’t baked for five years. Cooking is her love language, but it pained her to speak it.

“I got into baking because it was so cathartic and enjoyable for me,” says Kelleher. “But I did it to death.”

In hindsight, in order for Crust to go from the small, darkened satellite bakery on Main Street to now two cozy cafés and, later, the addition of the massive bakery and restaurant BirchTree Bread Company, Kelleher needed the break.

“That’s when I started working on the business, not in the business, which I grew to love,” she says. Five months pregnant with her first child, in 2019, Kelleher withdrew from baking at Crust.

Several years of relentless work led to this disenchantment. She had purchased Crust in 2017—then the bread and pastry arm of the gastropub Armsby Abbey—and, at just 25, she not just ran it herself, but transformed it and grew the bakery into something bigger. Kelleher remembers a 40- or 50-day stretch during which she spent nearly all her time at the bakery.

“It was like my drug,” she says.

Crust, under Kelleher, turned into a brighter place, with delicious new things to ogle, like buttery croissants and sugary cider donuts. Rossi came into the picture around then, and the couple’s days off simply freed up time for them to run more errands for Crust.

“We made our dates into work dates,” Kelleher says.

Only once she had a baby on the way and the world was about to shut down for Covid did she realize she was headed for a burnout. It took another two years, and another bun in the oven, before she thought about baking at Crust again; and she did so reluctantly, mainly because Crust was having trouble hiring new bakers.

“I did not love baking when I was pregnant the first time. And I wasn’t thrilled to have to do it again,” Kelleher says.

In part, Kelleher knew what she was getting into going from employee to owner at Crust. She comes from a family of entrepreneurial scrappers; her great-grandfather and grandmother, George and Catherine Tsagarelis, created a legacy from a tiny luncheonette, opening George’s Coney Island on Southbridge Street in Worcester around 1928. Her family, including her mother, Kathryn Tsandikos, has kept the iconic restaurant—known for its grilled frankfurters—thriving since. Kelleher witnessed the power of cooking at Coney Island, the idea that food made with respect and passion can change someone’s day for the better and leave a warming memory.

“When I was really little, I’d go around and help sweep. And then I’d help pick up the dishes. You see people come in and they’re so happy, and they have memories of coming in when they were little,” she says. “It was a special place for me, a special place for my mom. My great-grandfather and grandmother really built it, and I felt a connection to them.”

Unlike other members of her family, though, Kelleher doesn’t enjoy commanding a room as the smiling, affable face behind the counter. She’s an admitted introvert, and relates to those more elusive and reticent occupants of the kitchen: bakers. Her idea of fun in middle school and high school involved escaping to a corner in her kitchen with a stand mixer. In her early days at Crust, she relished the solitude of eight hours of uninterrupted baking.

“At Crust, when she was baking it was an open kitchen,” says Rossi. “People would see her in the back and would want to chat her ear off, and she’d go back to rolling croissants.”

Even now, having set the standard for baked goods in the second largest city in New England, Kelleher says she harbors insecurities over how people perceive her as a leader.

“Maybe you think there’s this person with a baking empire, and she’s an empress,” she says. “Our manager the other day said to me, ‘You’re, like, a badass, boss bitch.’ But to me there’s a disconnect with how I see myself.”

If Kelleher were to act like this vainglorious leader, she says it would be faking it. Being true to herself and her soul is why, after culinary school and traveling all the way to Charlottesville, Virginia, to bake, she chose to return to Worcester, to her family and her roots. At midnight her shifts would begin at the 29-year-old Albemarle Baking Company in Charlottesville. And between baking she would chat with her coworkers, bakers from New York City, Canada, even Africa. They struck her as settled. And it scared her.

“They all would say, ‘I was moving around, then I met my wife, my husband, and I’ve been here for 25 years now,” says Kelleher. “I was terrified that I was going to meet someone and be in Charlottesville for the rest of my life, separated from my family, so I only stayed there for six months, and then I came back up here.”

Hidden beneath Kelleher’s reserved exterior, too, is a competitive fire. It comes out on the golf course at Worcester Country Club, where during rounds she forged most of her business connections in the city. And that fire burned three months after having her second baby, when the opportunity to buy the rival—and hugely popular—BirchTree Bread Company arrived. She was dubious when her broker showed the listing. Why would BirchTree, one of the main contributors to the revival of the city’s Canal District, be up for sale? Then she got the nondisclosure agreement and called her banker.

“Crust and BirchTree both opened in 2014. And I went there with a coworker. I remember walking in and had a little pit in my stomach, because this is the kind of space I wanted to have one day, and Worcester can’t have two of these,” Kelleher says. “I remember feeling some melancholy. ‘This is awesome, but I want it.’ I don’t think I actively felt that way for eight years, but when I found out it was available, I said ‘OK, that’s it.’”

May 2024 marked two years that Kelleher and Rossi have owned BirchTree. Yet it has felt like two months. They have largely let BirchTree operate as it had been, making few changes beyond adding more tables. Behind the scenes, they shifted all of the baking at Crust’s Main Street bakery to BirchTree, which freed up space there for more seating and created a vibe closer to that of a café. Requests stream in from people wanting to rent BirchTree for private events. However, it is too busy for them to close it, even for a couple of hours. With the space available now at Main Street Crust, they plan to use it for BirchTree-catered events.

“I’m seeing and understanding for myself how the brands work together,” Kelleher says. “We’re Worcester Baking LLC now, and I think that it’s the bread and the pastry and the other baked goods that tie us together. Everything else separates us.”

After her dream about focaccia a few months back, Kelleher found herself baking at home again. She remembered again her love language, as if coming out of a stress-induced fugue. The separation helped, she says, because she had the chance to remind herself why she started baking and how much she still loves it. A comfort has set in with her status as a boss, the owner of a baking company that employs some 65 people.

“I’m still the reserved person I’ve always been,” she says, noting, “It’s tough. Having kids has made it easier, because my oldest son is Mr. Personality. I can let him be the center of attention.”

birchtreebreadcompany.com
crustbakeshop.com