Comet Bakery is now open at 640 W. Woodbine in Kirkwood, the space that previously housed Comet Croissanterie & Creamery and has served as a commissary kitchen for Comet Coffee. With bakers Natalie Suntrup and Kyle Shelby at the helm, Comet Bakery puts an emphasis on quality croissants, Danishes, and other pastries. Already, Comet’s baked goods have been a hit at the Comet Coffee location near Forest Park (5708 Oakland), as well as at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market. Here’s what to know before you go.
The Atmosphere
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The shop features a small counter with stools for those who want to enjoy their fresh pastries onsite. Customers can watch Shelby, Suntrup, and two other full-time staff members at work six days per week. Visitors may get a glimpse of the bakers pressing the butter to remove air while preparing the pastry dough. Staff members take turns working the counter, which means customers can ask questions about the production process. “That’s one of the cool things about our bakery,” Suntrup says. “You get to talk to the person who’s making it all.”
The bakers are happy to talk through the process, from lamination (locking the butter into the dough by folding and rolling it over and over) to fermentation (the dough’s first rise, in which it develops air pockets as yeast consumes sugar and gives off carbon dioxide) to proofing (the dough’s second rise, after it’s shaped for baking, when delicate layers and flavors develop). “Our main focus is getting every single part of the process right,” Suntrup says.
A key part of that drive for quality was scaling up to bake in larger batches, Shelby says. For example, “Comet already had an industrial laminator that’s made for a large-size ‘book’ [or pieceof dough to be folded], so when you use a larger among of dough that fits the table, it’s actually more manageable.”
They’re also happy to talk about other aspects of the business, all the way down to the all-purpose and pastry flour sourced from Janie’s Mill in Ashkum, Ill. “We’re pretty luck to be soclose to such an amazing organic farming operation and stone mill,” Shelby says.
The Menu
Look for classic favorites, such as pain au chocolat with its signature chocolate batons inside, twice-baked almond-chocolate croissants, and spicy ham and cheese Danishes.
Classic buttery croissants, sugar-tossed morning buns, and twice-baked pistachio croissants were among the most popular items at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market during the past year. Customers also snapped up such specialty items a twice-baked croissant hybrid, made from a surplus of chocolate chip cookies and a sweet, creamy frangipane-style filling. “That was so popular that we intentionally baked extra cookies to make a second batch the following week,” Shelby says.
Suntrup and Shelby also plan to continue offering season specials, such as Danishes with sweet potato casserole filling, cinnamon streusel, and torched Italian meringue. “We think of the Danish basically as a pizza,” Suntrup says. “It’s croissant dough that we’re putting interesting things on top of. Kyle and I both love to cook and to ferment, so this allows us to tap into those skills, too.”
While the bakery will stock coffee beans to take home and brew, it will only offer straight black coffee onsite—albeit very good black coffee. “For workflow and conceptual reasons, we just want straight black coffee to grab and go,” Shelby says. “We’re starting off with Blueprint as our house coffee, and we’ll see what happens from there.”
The Team
With a dark, caramelized outer layer, Comet Coffee’s croissants immediately stood out to Suntrup, who’s worked in bakeries from Columbia, Missouri, to California to Denmark. “I could tell right away that they were putting more butter into their croissants than any other croissant I’d ever tasted,” she recalls. “That’s why it’s so flaky and tender.”
After Suntrup developed a rapport with Shelby while baking bread together at Union Loafers, they joined forces a year ago to help Comet Coffee revamp its baking system under Comet Coffee’s founders, Mark Attwood and Stephanie Fischer. “We didn’t want to change the Comet croissant, because what Mark and Stephanie created is beautiful,” Suntrup says. “We studied their recipe and method, then put our own spin on it, using it as a platform for other interesting things.”
Shelby and Suntrup spent most of 2023 setting up new production systems and increasing capacity, producing roughly 1,800 pastries per day. “My major strength is setting up production systems and scaling up efficiently while maintaining a quality standard,” says Suntrup, who’s learned various ways of operating, from mass production to small-batch over time. Baking pastries at Comet, she says, “was a fun challenge and a great opportunity for me to practice using all the experience I’ve built up over the years.”
Within four months of their initial collaboration at Comet, Suntrup and Shelby had developed enough capacity that they could supply baked goods to the coffee shop and still have extra, so they launched pastry sales at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market in May. From the very first week, they were meeting and exceeding their sales goals—and refining their production and transportation processes.
As the farmers’ market season wound down in October, a new opportunity arose: Attwood and Fischer sold the company to Matt, Tim, and Jamie Garvey, owners of the Pretzel Boy’s local chain, who acknowledged the success that Suntrup and Shelby were having with their pastries and gave them the autonomy to reopen retail sales at the production facility in the Highlands Plaza shopping center.
