Radio Bakery [Prospect Heights]

Testing the flavor until it holds

The blueberry lime croissant asks for return work before it reaches the counter. Kelly Mencin, chef at Radio Bakery [Prospect Heights] in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, builds that kind of pastry from appetite, repetition, and the discipline of a kitchen service. Born in Cleveland, she traces the beginning to parents who cooked and baked at home, and to the sharper education of wanting to eat what was on the table. Before Radio, Mencin worked as pastry chef at Rolo’s and as a tournant at Gramercy Tavern, positions that sit behind the exactness of this second Brooklyn bakery: the timing, the reset, the ability to move from laminated dough to filled focaccia without treating either as a side task. At Radio, where she is pastry chef and co-owner, she has spoken plainly about the strain of the work: “It was and still is a LOT.” The sentence fits the bench. Prospect Heights opened on March 3, 2025, after the Greenpoint shop had already made Radio a morning habit for people willing to wait for bread and viennoiserie. Mencin’s station here is not ornament. It is the place where memory becomes formula, then gets tested again.

Timed waves from laminated dough to focaccia

The program turns on sequence. Croissants sit near the front of the day, with the blueberry lime croissant among the flavors that made the bakery’s name travel beyond Greenpoint. Focaccia carries the savory side: breakfast focaccia, everything focaccia, and sandwiches built on bread rather than bread used as a holder. Lunch brings Italian stirato baguette sandwiches and other focaccia-based work into the case, so the counter changes as the morning moves. The method favors small-batch freshness and limited daily output, with pastry, bread, focaccia, and sandwiches released in waves rather than held as a static display. Mencin’s own line about revision gives the cleanest view into the discipline: “Whenever we revisit a flavor or recipe, we always test and test and test.” Her Passionfruit Tart shows the other register, a 9-inch tart layered with silky curd, softly whipped crème fraîche, and fresh seeds for crunch, balancing passionfruit with chocolate and espresso. The bacon, egg and cheese focaccia makes a different argument, familiar and direct, built from the bread up.

Dough in view at Underhill Avenue

The Prospect Heights room is small, bright, and geared toward motion. On Underhill Avenue, between Sterling Place and St. Johns Place, the counter sits inside a daylight-filled space with limited indoor seating, outdoor tables, and a line that gives the room its pulse. The bench is not hidden from the guest side. Staff shape and divide dough at the front of the shop, so the work enters the room before the pastry does: hands on dough, trays moving, the next wave coming forward. The atmosphere is efficient rather than ceremonial. People read the case, the counter moves, and the bakery keeps returning to the same practical question, what is ready now. The original Radio name came from the Greenpoint building’s former life as a radio repair shop; in Prospect Heights, that inheritance feels less like nostalgia than a useful signal, a neighborhood room rewired around bread.

A second branch with another bench ahead

This address is the second Radio Bakery, following the Greenpoint opening in May 2023 and preceding a planned Upper West Side location in 2027. The Prospect Heights shop was built to carry the same breads, croissants, focaccias, and sandwiches into another Brooklyn neighborhood without loosening the sequence that defines the work. For Mencin, the next measure is practical: whether the testing holds as the bakery grows. That question will follow the blueberry lime croissant from Underhill Avenue to the Upper West Side in 2027.