Amy’s Bread

Dough shaped from the first bench

The sourdough ferments through the day, then bakes at night. Amy Scherber, Chef at Amy’s Bread in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, built that rhythm into the bakery she founded in 1992. Her path into bread ran through study, kitchen discipline, and repetition: St. Olaf College, New York Restaurant School from 1987, garde manger work at Bouley in Tribeca, bakery training in France, then a baker’s post at Mondrian on East 59th Street. The line is not decorative. It explains the way the Hell’s Kitchen shop still reads, less as a pastry case with loaves beside it than as a bread house with sweets, sandwiches, and coffee gathered around the bench.

Scherber opened the first shop in a 650-square-foot former fish market built in 1890, keeping the storefront trim and molding around the extended bay windows. The operation began with five employees and a bread-first ambition, then grew into a retail bakery, café, and wholesale kitchen with reach across New York. The scale changed; the governing idea did not. Hand-shaped loaves, traditional fermentation, fresh baking, and a refusal to make the work feel anonymous remain the bakery’s grammar.

Semolina, sourdough, and the hand

The program at Amy’s Bread is built on doughs that ask for touch before they ask for display. Organic rustic Italian, tangy sourdough, rye with caraway, country sourdough, black sesame, and semolina with golden raisins and fennel sit in a register that favors structure over decoration. The house has also made its name through French croissants, hand-rolled sourdough bagels, cinnamon espresso bread, monkey cake, almond croissants, sticky buns, cookies, bars, layer cakes, and the kind of café food that belongs beside bread rather than above it.

Measurements matter here because they show the pressure on the method. By 1996, the signature semolina dough reached 600 lbs daily, a figure that makes hand-shaping less a romance than a staffing, timing, and muscle problem. Scherber’s husband, Troy Rohne, joined the business in 1995 part-time and became full-time in 2002, taking on operations as the bakery’s wholesale work expanded to more than 200 restaurants, hotels, gourmet shops, and specialty stores. Bread that leaves the bench has to arrive with its crumb intact and its crust still carrying the decision made earlier in the day.

The room beside Ninth Avenue

The Hell’s Kitchen room keeps the feeling of a neighborhood bakery even as the name has traveled to Chelsea Market, Greenwich Village, and institutional cafés. Pastel color, indoor seating, the counter, and the visible pull of the bread case make the space warm without turning it soft. It is a counter-service room, but the pace is not thin. People come in for a loaf, a croissant, a sandwich, a cappuccino, a slice of cake; the room absorbs those errands and gives them a little time.

The original storefront matters because it keeps the bakery close to its first decision. Scherber has said, “I don’t really want to be bigger.” In a business that could have turned scale into its subject, the Hell’s Kitchen shop still points back to the bench, the nightly bake, and Amy Scherber’s cinnamon espresso bread.