Twenty five years ago, running a restaurant was Eric Alderman’s side job, while he worked as a full-time attorney. Today, he has plans to expand The Stoop Kitchen — typically known as simply “The Stoop.

The Stoop Kitchen has announced it will open a new retail bakery, called The Toast Syracuse, in mid-May. The bakery will be located three blocks away from The Stoop Kitchen’s current location on West Fayette Street. The Toast Syracuse is owned in partnership with The Toast Canastota, a restaurant and bakery located about 30 minutes outside of Syracuse.

Alderman said the idea behind opening a new location was primarily that he wanted to expand the bakery and make his products available to more people in the community.

“My first priority is expanding the bakery before we expand the restaurant,” he said. “Restaurants are far more complicated — the baking process is as complicated as anything when you’re making world-class bakery products.”

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The Stoop Kitchen currently operates as a bakery and cafe that’s open Wednesday through Friday at 7 a.m. and at 9 a.m. on the weekends. Alderman said it can be difficult to find qualified bakers, but after discovering The Taste Canastota, he found a company that fit his needs. Last year, the two companies started a partnership and The Stoop Kitchen began selling their baked goods in their bakery.

Now, The Stoop Kitchen will do all of its production of goods for The Stoop Kitchen’s bakery, The Toast Canastota and The Toast Syracuse at the new location. They will also be selling food and breakfast items there.

Alderman said he always wanted a bakery. He made it a priority to add it to The Stoop Kitchen after it reopened in 2016. He said it reminded him of a specific bakery from his childhood — the Snowflake Bakery.

“You can ask so many people my age, and even younger, who will tell you the best thing they could get on their birthday would be a snowflake whipped cream cake,” he said.

The Stoop Kitchen is located on West Fayette Street. The two-story restaurant has both a bar and cafe. Haley Robertson | Feature Editor

For Alderman, the restaurant and bakery isn’t just about the food. While the food they prepare is important, he said, the customer always comes first and he likes to give people a memorable experience.

“I wanted that kind of a bakery that was a community bakery that people loved to come in, they loved to gaze,” he said. “And we established that, we’re still one of a kind.”

Jennissa Hart, manager of The Stoop Kitchen, said the new bakery needed to open in order to make more room for the production of the baked goods. She said that once The Stoop Kitchen partnered with The Toast Syracuse, they realized they needed their own production space to grow in the way they wanted to.

Hart added that Alderman is always moving and has plans to keep growing as a business, and this is just one aspect of those goals.

“You can’t ever expect that what you see now is ever going to be the end of what Eric Alderman is doing,” she said. “He’s always moving, he’s always growing, he’s always trying to figure out what’s next.”

Kylie Starkey, owner of The Toast Canastota, said at her restaurant they only have one oven and that they work from midnight to 8 a.m. with “very minimal equipment and space.” She said the new location will be helpful because it will have three convection ovens and a triple-deck oven.

“We really love what we make, we want to get it out there any way we can,” Starkey said.

For her, working with Alderman has not only been a way to expand their business, but also a way to grow.

“It’s been great, he’s able to offer a lot of help, like a lot of advice in areas we aren’t very savvy in,” she said. “So it’s definitely nice to have that person there. Before we were doing it on our own.”

There will be seating outside the storefront when it gets warmer, he said, adding that they will be opening another bakery in close proximity to Syracuse University next fall. The SU bakery won’t only sell pastries and breads, but also pizza which brings Alderman back to his roots.

The Stoop Kitchen originally opened in 1994 as The Stoop. Instead of having a downstairs bakery and restaurant with an upstairs dining room like it does currently, The Stoop was solely located upstairs. Below it was a pizza place called Slices.

“It was speakeasy type place that focused on a tequila bar with a small comfort food menu and live entertainment four nights a week,” Alderman said.

He said his two loves are tequila and pizza. Now, he has found a way to incorporate both into his restaurant: one through the pizza at the upcoming SU location, and the second through his tequila bar, which Alderman said has more than 100 different types of tequila.

“His dream has always been bigger than just The Stoop Kitchen,” Hart said. “It’s never just been those four walls.”

Published on April 3, 2019 at 10:47 pm

Contact Sarah: srslavin@syr.edu