Welcome to the Nest Bakery!
Welcome to The Nest Bakery in Sunset Beach! We are Jonathan and Alex Hoffman, a husband and wife team working together (and still loving it), to spread love in our community inside a little white pastry bag. We are commonly told “we didn’t even know you were here” and we do apologize for that. Our passion and talents lie in food after all, not marketing. However, I digress as we are now here and your are probably wondering how we got here. It’s not the dewy-eyed dream of always wanting to own a bakery you might be expecting. This is in fact our second location, we opened our first spot (Dough Dough Bakery) in Seaside, OR in June of 2017 – before we were married, before we had children, before a lot of things…
In 2019 we were living in a cute little beach shack in Cannon Beach, one of the last remaining original beach houses of it’s time. We knew we were living on borrowed time there and would need to find a new place to live. The hunt for housing had never ended, but we were tired of renting so we were trying to find a place to buy. The search became serious when we were informed the time had come for us to move out, as the house was being sold. We moved in with some friends in the “in between” time and the big shutdown hit only a couple of weeks after we had moved in… talk about timing! While living with our friends, Jonathan was driving down Lewis Road to check out a house we had seen on the market. He drove by the empty bakery/café spot on the corner thinking “that would be a great spot for a little deli/bakery”. Jonathan is a dreamer and just couldn’t get it out of his head.
When he arrived home and presented the idea to Alex, she promptly responded with “we need another spot like we need a hole in the head, are you crazy?” Fast forward a week or so to chatting with our accountant, he asked a question that would change our life as we currently knew it drastically. He said “You’re going to have to pay a mortgage anyways, so why not let it pay for itself?” Both Jonathan I were much more receptive to the idea of a second location after that conversation, though still a little stressed out over it. We very quickly went down the rabbit hole and contacted the sellers.
Fast forward to June 2020, and we were turning the key and moving our things in! It was one of the most terrifying and exciting things we have done so far. We knew we didn’t want to do the exact same menu we had at our other location, so we got to work creating (and testing) a menu we thought would appeal to people – while also exciting us every morning. We opened our doors in August 2020, which was arguably one of the craziest times to open a new business, especially a food business. We constantly make jokes that you have to be a little masochistic to be in this industry, but it is 100% true. We opened our doors during a worldwide pandemic, with a two-year-old child, a second child on the way and an existing business just down the road.
This August, The Nest will be celebrating three years and we couldn’t be happier that we pulled the trigger on this great little spot. We have slowly gained the “trust” of the locals and made friends in the area. We have lots of tricks and ideas up our sleeves so please stop by for a bite, brew or just to say hello!
Love, Jonathan & Alex