Speaking of the press effect! There’s always been a crowd at Healdsburg’s newest and fanciest bakery, Quail & Condor, since it opened in 2020 — and if you stop by on a given afternoon, there’s usually not very much good stuff left. But Sonoma Magazine reports that the bottleneck is at a whole new level after the Gray Lady listed Quail & Condor as one of the nation’s 22 best bakeries last month.
“It just kind of flipped everything… we can’t make enough,” co-owner Melissa Yanc, an alumni of the Michelin-starred SingleThread empire, tells the magazine. According to Melissa and her husband, co-owner and fellow SingleThread alum Sean McGaughey, their wee bakery at 149 Healdsburg Ave. has been selling out of literally everything by 10am or 11am each morning. “It’s awesome,” Melissa says — but “we have to react so quickly, and it’s like we’re running with our heads cut off.”
The other spot they own in town, the Troubadour cafe just north of the plaza (known for its $20 sandwiches, and now also its $125 French dinners at night), has reportedly also seen a recent boost in customers, thanks to the New York Times piece.
Word is, the woman who wrote the article — a food journalist named Eleanore Park — used to live in Windsor, and once ordered a Quail & Condor cake for her baby shower. “We don’t pay for media and PR,” Melissa tells Sonoma Mag. “We earned it.”
This coming May, not a moment too soon, she and Sean plan to haul their bakery operation a couple of blocks north to a new location in the Mill Street shopping center, where they’ll have much more space for baking and serving (and parking) to meet all this growing demand.
