Jen Park is no stranger to the bread game.
She’s the baker and brains behind Whistler's now-shuttered 200 Degrees Café—once conveniently situated two blocks away from Pique Newsmagazine’s undercaffeinated staff in Function Junction—and The Bread Bunker on Nesters Road.
But after COVID shutdowns and a newborn forced the closure of the former and the sale of the latter, she thought she might be done with the bread game for good.
“A lot of journeys, especially being an entrepreneur in the restaurant business, they have a lot of ups and downs," she told me over a morning cortado. "There are so many reasons to just quit.
“But I didn't quit. I picked up, and I'm seeing a bit different future from here.”
Nestled in the Pemberton Industrial Park, a 10-minute drive up Highway 99 from the Village proper, sits Park’s latest and largest venture: the Bread Warehouse.
As you walk into the bakery, the modern, minimalist exterior fades to a warm, brick-accented lobby with a tightly packed array of pastries meeting your eye to the left of the main entrance.
The Bread Warehouse offers more than just its namesake. As Park talks me through her business, she’s fielding orders for breakfast sandwiches and sausage rolls. Her goal is to offer enough variety that people treat the Warehouse as a grocery store.
“I always focus on what people need every day—something that I could feed my kids, something that you want to bring home and share with your family," she said.
That’s not to say the product isn’t complex, high-quality and tasty as all get out. Park places a lot of emphasis on minute details that most people would not think twice about.
"Nobody else really focuses on the grain itself," she remarked.
"Take, for example, baguettes. There's nothing much in it other than flour, water, salt, but we work with quite a bit of ancient grain, and so [our bakers] have different understandings about how different grains act in different ways to provide nutrients and protein."
What might be more obvious to customers is Park and her team’s commitment to providing customers with as long of a sensation as possible.
She likens it to a mountain.
The climb starts when you smell a fresh piece of bread or one of the Warehouse's coffees, hits its zenith when you take a bite or sip and your taste buds react, then descends after the flavour fades. She and her team are focused on every part of the journey, but are always trying to increase that lingering sensation—flattening and lengthening the downhill trek.
The Bread Warehouse is entering its second full year of operation after it opened in November 2023. Park's goal for the place is to build it into a "third place"—a social environment removed from home and the workplace.
Granted, the space isn’t massive. More than half of the Bread Warehouse is taken up by its kitchen area, with massive machines that wouldn’t have been possible in her previous venues given the space constraints.
"[Bread baking] actually requires quite a lot of space, because we need we need a large radius to deal with quite a large amount of dough," she pointed out.
But what space there is, is plenty welcoming.
If you, like me, spend a good deal of time working and studying in coffee shops, one thing that’ll strike you is the lack of tip option at the cashier. That tip-less system is part of Park’s effort to fight what she sees as a backwards process at other coffee shops and bakeries.
"I started working in restaurants and hotels, so I understood that it is actually after the service that you like to leave a gratuity," she said. "But paying at a coffee shop, I don't know if the coffee tastes good or whether the service is good, but then if the payment transaction is already done ... it is a bit strange to me to have that as a request, like, prior to the service."
So, instead of asking for a tip upfront, she offers a tip jar and a box at the door if customers feel inclined to offer a gratuity.
“You have to bring the ownership to the customer,” Park said. “A tip before the service really breaks the connection.”
Between building a menu that's meant to rival a small grocery store and foregoing a more forcible tip option, Park's not just building a bakery, but an institution, one that fits into a diversifying industrial park, located between the Village of Pemberton and Mount Currie.
“I don't really see this as a food business all the way," she reflected. "I feel like it's more of service.”
