Na Young Ma

Coming Up

Training at the Culinary Institute of America gave Na Young Ma a foundation built on exacting technique and steady method. That background carried into the bakery she opened in Atwater Village, where baking was tied to operations as much as to product. The point was not just to make food, but to build a place where consistency, responsibility, and day-to-day order could hold. The bakery later moved into a worker cooperative owned and managed by its employees, a change that extended Ma’s thinking past ownership into continuity. That shift placed the people doing the work at the center of the structure, preserving the habits and standards already in place while giving them a more durable framework. In that sense, the transition was part bakery reform and part succession planning, with the operation built to carry forward on its own terms.

Where They Are Now

The bakery’s life as a worker cooperative owned and managed by its employees reflects the practical logic behind Na Young Ma’s stewardship. The arrangement keeps the work, culture, and standards she established from being tied to one person alone. Instead of treating the handoff as a break, it preserves the bakery as an operating business with its own internal continuity.

Signature

Na's signature dishes include chocolate espresso layer cake. It is the kind of dessert that depends on balance and control: layered construction, clear flavor separation, and enough intensity to register without losing structure. The cake fits a baker trained to value precision, because its appeal comes from execution as much as from richness.

In Their Words “It was so important for me also to make sure that if I left that people who had been working there would not leave and continue to have a job.” “I really wanted the business itself to carry on the values that I started.”