Bakers Bench Victor Heights

Plant fat folded at the bench

The lamination at Bakers Bench Victor Heights asks Jen Yee, owner and head pastry chef in Victor Heights, Los Angeles, to keep the fat cold and the layers clean without butter. Jen Yee built her pastry base at Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, then carried it through New York City kitchens where finish and timing had to survive service: Gilt from 2006, Aureole from 2010, Yauatcha, The Grill, Lafayette Grand Cafe and Bakery, and Hopkins & Company. That range matters here because Bakers Bench is not a vegan footnote to a conventional bakery. It is the method. The first permanent brick-and-mortar opened on May 31, 2024, after the bakery had worked as a pop-up and kiosk, and the Victor Heights counter gives Yee a steadier station for the plant-based viennoiserie that made the name travel across Los Angeles. The lineage is not presented as nostalgia. It shows in the restraint of the case: croissants, cookies, scones, danishes, each one relying on a pastry chef who knows what dairy usually does and has chosen to solve the problem another way.

A viennoiserie program without butter

The program is 100% vegan, centered on laminated dough and sweet pastry rather than a broad bread shelf. Croissants carry the argument. Without butter or dairy, the dough has to hold separation, lift, and tenderness through plant-based fat, temperature discipline, and repeated folding; if the fat warms too far, the layers lose their edge before the oven can set them. Yee’s work here is not substitution as apology. It is pastry technique under a narrower set of rules. The counter also moves through cookies, scones, danishes, and other plant-based bakes, with the selection changing by demand and availability. The bakery does not state a full list of sourcing partners, but the craft challenge is plain enough in the tray: vegan croissants need the same visual grammar as classic viennoiserie, the honeycomb, the shatter, the tender pull inside. Bakers Bench was included in The New York Times list of the 22 best bakeries in the United States in 2024, recognition attached to this bakery and its plant-based pastry, not to a borrowed reputation from another room.

The counter in Alpine Courtyard

The room is small and modern, a bakery counter set inside the Alpine Courtyard development near Chinatown and the Arts District. It feels built for a short exchange between the case and the hand: order at the counter, choose what has made it through the morning, carry the pastry out to the shared space or eat nearby while the next tray comes forward. The setting has a minimalist, homey tone, and the flow moves easily. This is not a long dining room with the pastry sent from somewhere hidden. The bench work is the point of the address. Popular pieces sell through, so the counter has the particular tension of a bakery that cannot fake abundance once the day’s folds are gone.

The permanent address changes the work

The move from pop-up and kiosk to Victor Heights gives Bakers Bench a fixed rhythm: a named bench, a recurring neighborhood audience, and a production day shaped around the same plant-based doughs rather than an occasional appearance. For Yee, whose career has moved between restaurant pastry, bakery leadership, and large pastry operations, the address narrows the focus in a useful way. The closing note here is still the croissant, because that is where the bakery’s discipline is most legible: flour, plant fat, heat, and the vegan croissant at Bakers Bench Victor Heights.