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It’s 9 a.m. on a Saturday at Moonbelly Bakery, and the line has stretched out the door and poured onto the sidewalk along the rusty red-paneled building, a former chicken hatchery.
The bakery celebrated one year open this past weekend after returning from a summer vacation, but its mid-morning line is a common feature — not an exception. And it’s one of the “fun parts” of visiting the bakery, said Sheila Auth, 65.
“I got to meet Sammy the dog — you know, you just start to meet people,” Auth said. “And I've had some great conversations just hanging here waiting to get in and get my weekly fix.”
Lines form both outside and inside the bakery on Aug. 19, 2023.Janelle Salanga/CapRadio
She’s been coming to the East Sacramento bakery — which is open 16-and-half hours a week — since it opened last August and quickly became a community hit.
The bakery is constantly drawing newcomers by word-of-mouth and via Instagram. Some patrons Saturday said they had come from Fairfield after seeing the bakery’s goods; others said they’d heard about it from friends. It’s helmed by owner and prodigal Sacramentan Lucía Plumb-Reyes, who started baking in college while “studying other things with other plans for my future.”
“I started disliking studying those things and liking baking way more, which meant I changed course, and eventually ended up a baker,” she said. “This first year has been amazing, beyond anything I ever expected, or even, like, thought possible.”
Making Moonbelly
While the bakery itself is a relative newcomer to Sacramento, Plumb-Reyes isn’t. She grew up in Land Park, and it’s rare that a week passes by without a friend, old acquaintance of hers or a bakery regular wanders in to be greeted with a wave and smile. Moonbelly Bakery is a reflection of what it means to build a place that’s deeply connected to the people and the area around it.
Touches of personality surround the vibrant space, a combination of existing building features like the red door, rusty panels and trellises along with ties to Sacramento.
A local business sells bouquets of flowers upfront, and the community corkboard that faces the register also shares local opportunities and businesses — like Honeyed, a cake business run by a Moonbelly employee. The “Moonbelly” ceramic letters on the display case are in Plumb-Reyes’ font, and are made by Plumb-Reyes’ friend. That tiling on the counter was put together by her high school biology teacher. Plants spill out of Alta Cucina tomato cans hanging from rooftop beams above the “employees only” sign, a red metal handprint in the shape of Plumb-Reyes’ son’s.
The "employees only" sign on Aug. 19, 2023.Janelle Salanga/CapRadio
“People were incredibly kind to help create those design elements of the bakery for me, considering that I had no budget or designer,” Plumb-Reyes said. “So it's very simple, but highly personal.”
Even the name of the bakery is personal: “Moonbelly” is a term of endearment between her and her husband, like “sweetie pie” or “honeybun.” He was the one to suggest the name for the bakery.
“It was like, ‘You're right, that's the name. That's a great name for a bakery,’” she recalled. “Immediately, it made sense.”
For very practical reasons, the Plumb-Reyes family came back to Sacramento after Plumb-Reyes got pregnant: Better weather here than in St. Paul, where her husband’s family is from.
Then it took five years to nail down the current East Sacramento location. It was a chicken hatchery in the ‘20s and ‘30s that has remained largely unchanged since then, even when the current landlords purchased it in the ‘80s.
“It was the right decision to keep looking because eventually I found this space, and so many things about it were right and better than any of the other spaces that I looked at,” she said.
Among those things are the string-light-lined patio and the bakery’s set-up, which makes stepping inside feel intimate. The open kitchen blurs the lines between back and front of house, making the chaos of preparation fully visible.
Customers can look into the open kitchen while waiting in line.Janelle Salanga/CapRadio
Plumb-Reyes describes the baking work as “physical, … rhythmic.”
“It’s also totally chaotic at times,” she said. The open kitchen dynamic is one she learned she liked at her first coffee shop job in New York — where back of house workers still got to know customers.
Her crew is small — under 10 people work the register and pull together breads, sandwiches and drinks behind the scenes. That’s another common thread Plumb-Reyes realized she wanted to pull from her favorite work experiences into the bakery: “I always really loved working for small operations where you actually did get to know some of your regular customers.”
“Even though I wasn’t wanting to be front of house myself, I liked being able to see the customers that were enjoying the fruits of my labor,” she said. “I want people to see the labor that goes into what they’re buying and consuming … I want them to see us making this stuff, and engaging with it in a new way.”
What’s inside
Baked goods — their labels stamped by letterpress — are lined up on speckled ceramic plates, wire racks and placed in baskets. They’re protected from curious hands by glass, and from flies with lazily spinning two-blade fans. Italian glass insects hang out on the wooden countertop, mocking guards for real bugs that might want to get into the pastries.
First-time customer and East Sacramentan Lana Watts, 50, said she was most excited to try the bakery’s croissants on a friend’s recommendation.
“I love trying new places, and I want to support the local businesses,” she said. “Once I saw the line around the building, I was like, ‘Okay, now I'm committed. I gotta see what this is about.’”
Auth said her favorite pastries are the cardamom buns, made with croissant dough and seasoned with a dusting of spices and sugar.
“Her cardamom buns and the croissants are to die for, and the special bread she makes, it's wonderful,” she said. “Everybody should come here, at least at least once. And you'll keep coming back.”
Lucía Plumb-Reyes rolls out croissants while worker Sam Abbott works on walnut sandies for the next day after close of service on Aug. 19, 2023.Janelle Salanga/CapRadio
Worker Sam Abbott has another suggestion for customers: The peanut butter mazapán cookie. Mazapán is a Mexican candy typically made with powdered sugar and peanuts.
“It’s like peanut butter shortbread with a mazapan filling on the inside, and it is lightly sweet, so delicate and crumbly,” he said. “Don't even wait until you get home. Just immediately destroy that thing, because it is so delicious.”
At 10:30 a.m., the menu begins to expand to lunchier, more savory fare like veggie and ham and cheese melts, topped focaccia wryly labeled “not pizza” and a variety of sandwiches, like mortadella and pickled onions.
Both the drink and pastry menu are kept tight with some opportunity for seasonal variation. Predominantly, there are croissants — traditional, chocolate, almond, chocolate almond, salty sesame. Cinnamon and cardamom buns made with croissant dough accompany them, as do seasonal fruit and veggie croissants. A jammy egg sits in the middle of the ham and egg croissant, shaped like a muffin; the ham and cheese croissants and seasonal quiches hold the same shape.
Moonbelly Bakery pastries on sale on Dec. 16 2022.Janelle Salanga/CapRadio
Bread is a more steady part of the line-up.
“In the springtime, we did a twist with green garlic, but for the most part, the bread is fairly static,” Plumb-Reyes said. “Even then we like kind of mixing it up in little ways — we just did the pecorino black pepper twist.”
The bakery doesn’t serve espresso drinks, but they rotate cold brew specials — made with in-house syrup and oat milk — and different iced teas.
Sam Abbott is one of the bakery’s earliest employees, and got roped into the work by virtue of his sister and Plumb-Reyes knowing each other since preschool — she wanted him to provide insight on the bakery’s coffee menu, since he had been a barista in San Francisco for 10 years.
Sam Abbott poses above a Moonbelly mixer on Aug. 19, 2023.Janelle Salanga/CapRadio“I knew that something special was going to happen, and she offered me a job,” he said. “Originally, I started out working the counter and that progressed to becoming a baker.”
Abbott also masterminded the bakery’s drink options: Moonbelly lacks an espresso machine, “so it’s going to be really simple, easy drinks, nothing too crazy.” There’s hot coffee, iced coffee, and along with a few tea options, there’s a cold brew special: “Something sweet, creamy and full of caffeine for the people who need it in this life.”
The cold brew special is by default non-dairy, and is made with oat milk.
“It does have a little bit of a cereal flavor to it,” they said. “But it goes well with when you’re serving things in the morning — oat milk is for the masses. It’s for the people who have tummy issues, people who are allergic to nuts, so it was always going to be oat.”
“I had worked at a place that did oat milk iced coffees, cold brews, and they sweetened it, so I kind of extrapolated from that idea,” he continued. “Since Lucía’s got the background in master food preservers’ and making syrups … we opened up to trying a lot of different flavors of syrups.”
Those have ranged from a mint chocolate syrup to a Café de Olla syrup.
Community connections
Abbott’s contributions to Moonbelly have been instrumental in more ways than one — they helped build the bakery’s oven, and their dad is in the Ryman Brothers, a local bluegrass band that plays on Moonbelly’s patio at least once a month.
The bluegrass is just one of several patio-oriented community events Moonbelly has orchestrated. Another is storytime with a local children’s librarian, and a cookbook potluck club during the bakery’s off-hours that’s open to anyone — just bring a recipe from the planned cookbook to share. (The next one is this weekend, and the cookbook is Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s Vibration Cooking.)
But there are also other, less obvious ways the bakery builds relationships with its customers and community.
Bakery regular Auth said one time, she wanted to bring cardamom buns to a last-minute early morning event — while the bakery has a two-day advance notice requirement, Auth asked Plumb-Reyes the day before if she could stop by first thing in the morning at 8 a.m. to pick up 24 of the buns.
The next morning, they were there and ready.
Moonbelly Bakery also works to divert its food waste in a number of ways: By aiming to create less of it — leftover chocolate croissants can become twice-baked to metamorphise into chocolate almond croissants for the next day — and by sharing extras.
The Awkward Gardener’s Community Table is a local mutual aid group that redistributes food to Sacramento encampments and mutual aid fridges. After staff have had their pick of extra pastries and drinks, waste and leftovers from Friday and Saturday will be wrapped up and frozen, then passed onto the group.
“We could put it in the compost … but this is like, perfectly good product that can still be eaten,” Plumb-Reyes said. “That way it gets to bellies.”
She’s also advertised on Instagram the availability of a spoonful or two of sourdough starter for anyone who brings a container and wants it.
“Word has spread that if you bring me fruit from your yard, I will try and use it as much as I possibly can,” she said. “And that's awesome. Sacramento has amazing citrus trees. And then people have even brought me beautiful white peaches.”
Lucía Plumb-Reyes poses for a portrait in front of the one-year anniversary decorations, wearing a birthday hat, on Aug. 19, 2023.Janelle Salanga/CapRadio
“That kind of engagement, it feels good,” she said. “And it think it leads to better stuff all around — better food, a better business.”
The bakery doesn’t plan to move any time soon. Plumb-Reyes signed a ten-year lease with two six-year extensions, and says she’s in it for the long run.
“This good thing — I really want it to last.”
Moonbelly Bakery is located at 6511 Folsom Blvd. and is open 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Friday through Sunday.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the hours of operation on Sundays. It has since been updated.
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