Sleepy Owl bakery owners flying high

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This article was published 15/02/2015 (3917 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A couple of weeks ago, a first-time customer popped into Sleepy Owl Bread, a home-style bakery that opened at 751 Wall St. last October. After selecting a few loaves from the cooling rack, the woman spied a tray of fresh pastries and told owner Joanne Toupin she’d also take a couple of chocolate croissants “for the road.”

Moments later, Toupin was waiting on another person when she noticed the woman who had just bought the croissants was back in line. Toupin asked if she had forgotten something — her car keys, her bank card… her wallet?

The woman shook her head no. Then she held up her empty croissant bag and announced, “I’m going to need four more of these.”

“That’s actually happened a few times since we opened,” said Toupin, who runs Sleepy Owl with her husband, Beau Burton. “I guess if people are having trouble getting to their cars without eating what they’ve bought, that probably means we’re on the right track.”

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Toupin and Burton met eight years ago next month. Toupin, a native of St. Claude and a graduate of Red River College’s professional baking program, was employed at Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company at The Forks. One morning, when her supervisor was away, it fell to her and a co-worker to interview candidates for a vacant catering assistant’s position.

Burton was one of the applicants, but he was running late for his scheduled appointment because he was travelling by bicycle and the streets were “super-slushy” because of a mid-March snowstorm.

Fifteen minutes after Burton’s assigned slot had come and gone, Toupin said forget it; she didn’t intend to sit around all day, wondering if he was going to show. Luckily, Toupin’s co-worker wasn’t in as big of a rush. “We didn’t get that many people applying, so we may as well wait a while longer,” he told her.

Burton landed the job, despite his tardiness. He and Toupin started dating soon thereafter and almost immediately began tossing around the idea of establishing a bakery of their own someday.

‘I guess if people are having trouble getting to their cars without eating what they’ve bought, that probably means we’re on the right track’

Their first step toward that goal occurred five years later, in 2012. Burton and Toupin, by then the parents of a son, Jude, were both working at Diversity Food Services at the University of Winnipeg. When the school year ended, their hours at the downtown campus decreased significantly. So that summer, they decided to rent a booth at the Wolseley Farmers’ Market two afternoons a week to supplement their income.

The couple’s artisanal breads, which included rustic sourdough and roasted garlic infused with Half Pints beer, were an immediate hit with shoppers — so much so their ‘sold out’ sign usually went up well before the market closed for the day.

“That was a crazy time in our lives,” said Toupin. “We were putting in 16-hour shifts, baking two loaves at a time in our oven at home. Our house always smelled great, but we didn’t have air-conditioning, so it was absolutely sweltering, too.”

Buoyed by their success, the pair returned to the Wolseley market in 2013. This time, they did their baking in a commercial kitchen — the downside being a fair chunk of their time was spent schlepping oversized pails of flour up two flights of stairs to their work area. By the end of the season, they agreed a place of their own was a necessity if they intended to take their operation to the next level.

That fall, Toupin enrolled in a business-management course offered by SEED Winnipeg. Every evening, she would sit in the living room working on feasibility studies while Burton — by then a baking assistant at the Crusty Bun on St. Mary’s Road — commandeered the kitchen, trying out one new recipe after another.

“My boss (at Crusty Bun) was really encouraging,” Burton said. “He knew we wanted a place of our own, and his feeling was the more from-scratch bakeries there were, the better it would be for everybody, because it would change people’s mindsets and get them thinking about something other than grocery-store bread.”

In April 2014, Toupin and Burton were combing through real-estate listings online. As luck would have it, a bakery on Wall Street, blocks away from their West End home, had closed, so they replied to the ad immediately. They signed the lease on May 1 with the intention of being at the Wolseley Farmers’ Market in mid-June, and opening to the general public by Labour Day.

“That didn’t really pan out,” Burton said, chuckling. “We ended up having to gut the place, which meant our first day at the market wasn’t until Aug. 19.”

Sleepy Owl Bread — the name is a nod to a baker’s nocturnal schedule — still didn’t have a sign over the door when it finally welcomed its first customers on Oct. 22, 2014.

“People would come in and say they drove around the block three times, till they finally spotted us,” Burton said.

OK, so maybe the bakery was difficult to find early on, but that all changed after a year-end newspaper review lauded it as one of the city’s best-kept secrets, describing its breads as “fabulous” and baked to “crusty perfection,” and its chocolate babka (available on Saturdays) as “a ticket to heaven.”

“The first Saturday after that write-up, the entire front of the building was packed well before we opened,” said Toupin. “We don’t open until 10 (a.m.) on Saturdays, but that morning, I started letting customers in at 8:30.

“By the time 10 rolled around, we were already pretty much sold out.”

The bakery is open five days a week, Tuesday to Saturday. Burton pulls the graveyard shift, arriving at midnight armed with a stack of audio books (this week he’s listening to George Orwell), to help him stay alert while he bakes.

Certain breads, such as a French loaf and hemp multigrain, are available every day. The shop also has a rotating list of “breads of the day,” including potato onion (Thursdays) and cinnamon oatmeal raisin (Fridays).

“Right now it’s just the two of us, so we’re a little maxed out by the end of the week,” says Toupin. “Saturday night has definitely become pizza night at our place, and there’s also been a huge influx of microwavable meals, to get us through this busy period in our lives.

“Hey, who knew broccoli would do so well in the microwave?”

 

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca