At 9 a.m. on a weekday, Tolgay Karabulut is wearing a sweatband on each wrist and the loose, wildly patterned pants of a guy trekking through Thailand. On the back of his T-shirt, it says: “Wanna check our nuts?”
Truly, Tolgay’s shirt, is boasting about the quality of his nuts. Though his stumble-upon bakery, located across from a Best Buy on the edge of the Mission, has a handful of bakers on staff, the founder of Baklavastory is driving every detail, even traveling back to his homeland of Turkey to harvest the pistachios. The result of all this singular-mindedness is hands-down the city’s best baklava.
But back to those nuts. The skinny, little pistachios, picked by hand from an orchard in Sanliurfa when they’re young and still cling tightly to the tree, are Tolgay’s babies. Like a proud dad, he gets out his phone to show me video footage of the last harvest he attended, in early July, waking at 4 a.m. before it got too hot to do the work. “Being out with the farmers,” he says, smiling blissfully, “I feel like I’m living life.”
He encourages me to taste the difference between the pistachios he uses — harvested when they’re still electric green and full of fats — and those harvested in the fall, at which point they can be machine-picked but are drier and duller in flavor. Second only to the pistachios, he’s invested in the English walnuts he uses for his other flavor of baklava, which are “better than Chandlers” and come from Red Bluff, a four-hour drive from San Francisco. He whacks one with a hammer and hands me its nubby meat.
Karabulut keeps samples of his nuts in jars at the register next to the trays of fresh-out-of-the-oven baklava for sale. The golden baklava crackles with the phyllo he makes daily and glimmers with the clarified butter pooling between the sugar-syrup-soaked, nut-layered squares. Though he recently signed up with delivery service Jingle, Karabulut sells most of his baklava directly from his kitchen. Every customer who stops by gets a free sample. “No one makes baklava here [in San Francisco] like the kind I grew up eating,” he says.
Compared to some of the heavy clunkers I’ve had, his baklava is indeed revelatory: crisp, delicate but rich, and meltingly delicious. The only other thing he sells is kaymak — which is similar to clotted cream — made by the SF Kaymak Company, which, when scooped and spread between pieces of baklava, takes the whole thing to the next level.
Karabulut moved to the U.S. in 2005, arriving in San Francisco four years later. “I love it here,” he says, mixing eggs, flour, and ice water for the phyllo dough he makes daily. Barring the huge flat-screen TV playing his favorite YouTube show, “Flavour Trip,” his kitchen is a serene scene. His few employees are standing around a work table, calmly pulling baklava out of the deck oven and lining pans with the phyllo, sprinkling it with a layer of nuts, more phyllo, and a spritz of clarified butter. With his eastern Mediterranean accent, he speaks kindly in Spanglish to one of his bakers: “Señorita, did you get uno mas egg?”
Though the nuts are the stars of the baklava, Karabulut attends to every ingredient with the same compulsion. When I arrive on a Thursday morning so I can see the surreally transparent, tissue-thin phyllo rolling out of the $30,000 sheeter like silk, he tells me he spent the previous night watching YouTubes about flour. The three types of preservative-free, stone-ground wheat flours he uses include an ancient variety from Mesopotamia (“it’s 500, maybe 1,000 years old”). He believes each one adds a different element to the baklava, from the crisp to the shine.
Then there’s the butter, made from sheep’s milk Karabulut gets from a Turkish dairy started by his father’s cousin, the owner of a cheese factory. “We have like 2,000 sheep now,” he says, thumbing again through his iPhone pics (which, tellingly, do not appear to feature anything unrelated to baklava, like a family member or a cat). This time, he lands on a video of adorable lambs. “To make great butter, you need the best milk. Springtime has the most nutrient-dense green grass,” he says, “which is why I make butter only once a year.”
I get the sense that Karabulut throws himself into things — perhaps at random. Prior to Baklavastory, he had a limo company (which explains his Kardashian-level black Cadillac Escalade parked across the street), ran a toy business out of kiosks at local malls, and sold handmade sandals from Nicaragua. Apparently, the next, most obvious choice, was to start a baklava business. Having never worked in a kitchen, he dove in deep, apprenticing with baklava makers in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Greece, and Egypt.
As if on cue, two Turkish guys who run a Middle Eastern grocery store in San Ramon stop by. They’ve heard through the grapevine that Baklavastory makes the best around, and they are hoping Karabulut has a way to distribute. For now, he’s not set up to do so, but it just so happens that the grocery store also carries the kaymak made by the mother of Karabulut’s friend, so, he says, maybe his baklava can hitch a ride.
Karabulut barely has signage. His operation is based entirely on word of mouth — just like this. He has sold baklava to folks at OpenAI and to the founder of Dandelion Chocolate, both companies down the street. He sells his phyllo dough to Emirates Airlines for the airport chef to use in the lounge. But most people just stop in.
An irrepressible entrepreneur, he has plans to open more locations and shows me pictures of a cafe design he’s showing his architect: very white, spare, and beautiful. Next up, he’s aiming for West Hollywood. From there, Chicago, New York, Miami, maybe Paris, and Tokyo. And when he becomes famous — which I wouldn’t put past him — San Francisco will be able to say: We knew Tolgay Karabulut’s nuts back when.
Baklava trays range from $25 (12 pieces) to $99 (70 pieces). Phyllo is sold for $9 a pound.
- Website
- baklavastory.com