To know where San Francisco’s biggest feeding frenzies are happening, follow the lines. One of the longest is on an otherwise quiet residential block in North Beach, where, on a Saturday at 9:35 a.m., you’ll find 65 fiending customers snaking out of Butter & Crumble.

For owner Sophie Smith, the 28-year-old pastry wunderkind, and her all-female staff (“passionate girlies taking the SF pastry scene by storm,” her website says), such waits have become standard at the year-old bakery. Recology workers double-park their garbage trucks to grab a bacon, egg, and cheese. The mukbangers of TikTok squirrel away in their cars, making videos as they devour twice-baked apple croissants, pumpkin ricotta swirls, and sausage pain suisse, theatrically wiping buttery shards from their faces. 

Smith knows the power of scarcity and keeps her more than 37,000 Instagram followers on edge about which pastries have sold out. Rabid customers have tried to buy up the whole shop; a hastily handwritten sign instructs customers that they may buy 10 pastries max, three per item. By late morning, the takeout-only bakery will have sold 900 croissants.

It’s fair to say that Smith — who launched her business as a pandemic pop-up in 2020, when she was straight out of cooking school — is the new queen of pastry in a city that’s never had so many excellent choices. This is not to say that Smith is more talented, per se, but she has a way with laminated dough, fun and untraditional flavor combinations, and social media. This has made her a triple threat to be reckoned with. 

Butter & Crumble is just one of more than a dozen dynamic bakeries and patisseries that have popped up in the past couple of years. With many full-service restaurants struggling, the Bay Area’s pastry scene, fueled in part by “treat yourself” culture, has become where the energy is. It is led predominantly by women, many of them Asian-American and working with a variety of regional flavors and techniques. 

Melissa Chou is one example. Her choice to abandon the fine-dining world has been everyone’s reward. In 2020, the talented pastry chef and SF native left her post at Mister Jiu’s, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Chinatown, when the dessert program was reduced. That’s what compelled her to launch Grand Opening, her pop-up patisserie — or “bake sale,” as she puts it — which sells from a window at Mister Jiu’s kitchen.

“A lot of bakers are finding ways to be their own boss now,” she said. “There’s a great deal of appeal to running things the way you want to run them, setting your schedule, and not having to work in a restaurant, honestly. It’s really hard to make a living being a [restaurant] cook.” 

Grand Opening is open on weekends in hard-to-park Chinatown, but that doesn’t stop people from coming for her pastries flecked with passion fruit, coconut, black sesame, or miso. She makes a dynamite coconut “scroll” with laminated milk-bread dough and a tiny, deeply caramelized pineapple upside-down cake with brown-butter-and-walnut frangipane.

“I like things that are sort of deceptively simple,” said Chou. She is proud of her sponge cakes because “the texture is difficult to achieve,” she noted. “They’re really delicate.” 

One of Chou’s biggest customers and fans, Chae Park, returned twice in one day recently to buy goodies for friends. The recent college grad, who lives in Potrero Hill, loves Chou’s “mixture of familiar flavors with some twist of novelty,” especially the chocolate ginger miso cake, which has “a very decadent, surprising mouthfeel,” said Park, clearly a student of culinary jargon. “And these are all flavors that I wouldn’t have expected. And I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is very good.’”

Marisa Williams, who worked alongside Chou at Mr. Jiu’s, is another restaurant pastry chef who has struck out on her own. After honing her craft baking in Copenhagen and Berlin, she started her Dogpatch pop-up Sol in June, partnering with Neighbor Bakehouse, where she sells her popular tarts, cakes, and choux on Mondays. Her big, bubbly focaccias studded with whole olives or vegetables are beloved. But on one drizzly October morning, her guava tart —  pale pink filling glistening beneath a luscious cloud of vanilla-bean-flecked cream — stole the show. 

It may seem noncommittal to have a pop-up, but some of the most innovative work is being done by pastry chefs who have opted to avoid the expense of a brick-and-mortar location. Many produce pastries out of their own homes, which is legal under the California Homemade Food Act. This has given rise to the comforting cinnamon rolls from Astranda Bakery, run by Eric Chow, formerly the pastry chef at Bar Agricole. There are also Le Carousel Patisserie’s “old-school” French delicacies, such as financiers and raspberry charlottes, baked up by Jeremy Mullet, a native of Royan, France, and a former pastry chef at Le Marais Bakery; he regularly sells outside of La Fromagerie in the Marina. 

Meanwhile, other bakers have taken the risk of four walls. At Jina Bakes, which opened in 2021 in Japantown after starting as a pop-up, Jina Kim’s kalbijjim croissant has developed a cult following. A year later, Four Barrel Coffee owners Tal Mor and Jodi Gere opened Loquat in Hayes Valley and had similar success with their poppyseed walnut babka rolls. In October, Michelle Hernandez of Le Dix-Sept, the self-proclaimed “queen of canelé,” expanded from the Mission to open a second bakery at the bottom of a luxury condo building in Potrero Hill. 

Not everyone can afford the rents in San Francisco, though, which is how Tarts de Feybesse ended up in Oakland. The brand-new buzzy bakery was opened by Monique and Paul Feybesse, savory chefs with experience at European Michelin-starred restaurants who started tinkering with their sweet side over the pandemic. Eschewing croissants, the patisserie sells French classics with Filipino flair, such as mango eclairs, alongside traditional standouts like a finely layered brioche feuilletée made with copious amounts of butter. 

With all of this bounty, the stakes are high, and the competition is fierce. At the Best Croissant in San Francisco competition in May, Juniper Cafe, the pastry shop opened last year by the folks from Saint Frank Coffee, won for its Cubano version, defeating rivals One65, Starter Bakery, and Craftsman and Wolves. Juniper Cafe pastry chef Amy Chen cried. Despite her win, she has a bit of croissant imposter syndrome: “I mean, I know our product is good, but you always feel like there’s someone that’s better.”

At Butter & Crumble, Smith knows exactly what Chen means. “There’s a lot of self-doubt in the state of the world right now — especially doing something like this,” she said. “Sometimes I have to shield myself from even looking [at social media], because I don’t want to feel like I’m mimicking someone else’s work.”

In a show of solidarity, Smith and her baking team recently got tiny pastry tattoos. Smith opted for a line drawing of her signature blackberry ricotta “swirl” — made with blackberry jam, ricotta custard, cream, and cinnamon-oat crumble — one of her most emulated items. The tattoo, she said, “is just a reminder to me that I can come up with something that people will love.” And clearly, they do.