At the corner of Jefferson Avenue and North 25th Street in Church Hill, a sandwich-board sign reads, “We kindly ask: Only four people in front of the pastry case at a time.” Behind it, a line of 20 customers swaddled in puffy coats trails up the sidewalk. They appear anxious and excited, rubbing their hands together and yearning for endlessly flaky croissants. After a yearlong pause following a fire in November 2024, Richmond’s Sub Rosa Bakery reopened in December of last year, and while the building itself remains intact, much of what’s inside has changed.
Deja Vu
Elizabeth Williams, Sub Rosa’s kitchen manager, was asleep when the fire started. It was three days before Thanksgiving, and she was looking forward to an afternoon shift working the oven and staying in bed until 8 a.m. (late for a baker). But as soon as she saw a log of missed calls on her phone, she knew something was wrong. Minutes later, Sub Rosa co-owner Evrim Dogu was on the line saying, “You should get here.” Williams raced to the bakery, where the last flames had just been extinguished. The precise cause of the blaze remains unknown.
Williams’ first thoughts were about the dozens of special orders leading up to the holidays. “And then, when I got to the bakery, and we walked through and we realized how bad it actually was, I was like, ‘Oh, there is not going to be Christmas, and there won’t be Valentine’s Day,’” she says. “It didn’t really sink in until I was physically in the space.”
The shared mood of the co-owners, siblings Evrim and Evin Dogu, and their staff was one of shocked disbelief. In 2013, only a year after Sub Rosa first opened its doors, a fire sparked by a cigarette had shuttered the fledgling bakery for a year. Now they were staring down another fire-related closure just as the bakery was poised for a busy season. This time, the Dogus say, the stakes felt even higher. Sub Rosa was no longer a four-person operation; their business had grown to include a team of eight bakers, plus the front-of-house staff. The idea of letting them all go was unfathomable.
Evrim and Evin decided to retain a team of core bakers, all of whom had been at the shop for three years or longer. Williams and shift managers Sam Gerecke and Seamus McHugh were the most tenured, each cross-trained on the bakery’s three kitchen shifts: pastries, bread and working the oven. With insurance money and other funds, the Dogus were able to keep the small team and a few front-of-house staff employed during what would come to be known as the restoration period. Over the months that followed, Sub Rosa’s appearance, recipes and even the hearth itself would be transformed.
In a way, Evin says, the timing felt uncanny. She recalls a conversation with her father, who lived next door to the bakery at the time, about the challenges of baking in a wood-fired oven. “I wonder if there’s a way to have a different oven, even though it’s the centerpiece,” Evin mused. “And I remember my dad saying it would be so expensive and time consuming, and everyone knows us as a wood-fired bakery. It might not ever be possible.” The fire, devastating as it was, presented an opportunity, and the Dogus asked themselves: If not now, when?
Plugged In
Sub Rosa going electric kind of feels like Bob Dylan plugging in at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival — it changes something essential. There’s an elemental and wild aspect to baking with fire; an electric oven changes the dynamic. But just as Dylan’s shift heralded a new era in his music, Sub Rosa’s electric conversion signals innovation and growth.
The new oven, a steam-injected, four-deck behemoth from the Italian manufacturer Bassanina, is the most striking difference between the new Sub Rosa and its previous incarnation. Evrim explains that the move from their wood-fired oven to the Bassanina EcoPower — what he poignantly terms a “hearth transplant” — is beneficial for the physical health of the bakers and for the environment. Eventually, he says, the change could allow them to realize their long-term dream of operating an entirely solar-powered bakery.
The biggest change that Sub Rosa has undergone is that we now exclusively use stone-ground flour in everything we bake.
—Evin Dogu
Yet ambivalence about losing the wood-fired hearth runs through Evrim’s words in a tender mix of longing and optimism. “There is undeniable magic to working with, baking and cooking in a wood-fired oven,” he says. “We will miss it. There will always be a place for these ovens in the world. If we felt that changing the oven would alter the soul of our bakery or the essential character of our baked goods, we wouldn’t do it.”
“There was a lot of grieving for the oven,” Williams says. “It was one of my favorite parts about the job and the place. Even though it was such a big limiting factor, it was definitely very sexy.” Williams says she feels deeply grateful for her time working with the wood oven, which she credits with making her a better, more intuitive baker.
The current oven theoretically allows the bakers to double their production, easing a major prefire pressure point and smoothing the edges of an already very demanding task — baking pastries and bread simultaneously. “Bread and pastry baking require a lot of attention, and they have different bake times,” Evin explains. “But when you’re doing both at the same time, you’re juggling — taking the bread out while also not burning pastries, rotating them in the right amount of time. It’s a big juggling act.” The electric oven doesn’t change that reality, but it gives the bakers more space and consistency and, thus, better odds for success.
Sub Rosa continues to offer the pastries and breads they are known for, such as sour cherry-pistachio croissants and rustic loaves, but the team has also expanded their menu, including weekends-only muffulettas, a nod to the Dogus’ Louisiana roots. Offering sandwiches would have been extremely difficult without the production capacity of the deck oven, Evrim says, but now they’re part of the vision. Vegetarian options and additional grab-and-go sandwiches are on the horizon.
Time to Rise
Though the electric oven is a fundamental change to the bakery, Sub Rosa’s core bakers agree it isn’t the most profound difference. “For the first time ever, the biggest change that Sub Rosa has undergone is that we now exclusively use stone-ground flour in everything we bake,” Evin notes.
Using solely their own stone-ground flour was always a goal for the Dogus. Over the years, bakers began checking off menu items they could make from locally sourced, stone-milled grains — first bread, then tart crusts and other sundries. But their croissants, made with organic roller-milled flour, remained the outlier. Production was always maxed out, and every minute of the dough lamination schedule was accounted for, leaving no room to sneak in a test batch.
But the pause for rebuilding after the fire finally gave the bakers something they desperately needed — time. After establishing a temporary residence at Hatch Kitchen in April 2025, Williams, Gerecke and McHugh pursued the goal with laser focus and soon formulated a croissant made from stone-ground flour that met their standards. In addition, Evrim dialed in the design of the bakery’s flour bags, a project that predated the fire, enabling Sub Rosa to begin selling its stone-milled flour to about a dozen retail accounts and in-house.
The emphasis on stone-milled grains is reflected on the bakery’s front door. Where hand-painted text once announced that Sub Rosa’s bakes were wood-fired, it now states they are 100% stone-ground — a claim only a handful of bakeries in the country can make.
“There’s not a single speck of bought flour in the entire bakery,” Gerecke says with obvious pride. “Now, everything that we work with is milled in-house by our amazing millers. We’ve completely restructured how Sub Rosa works, both internally and how it interacts with the mill.” That restructuring meant overhauling every element of daily operations, including the production schedule, from mixing to baking. The evolution was necessary to adapt to the bakery’s dramatic changes.
Part of what made Sub Rosa’s early years a success was the intuitive connection between Evrim and Evin. The siblings worked together in a way that was both harmonious and rare — and nearly impossible to replicate. Leading up to the fire and during the restoration period, a similar synergy clicked into place among the core bakers, solidifying that the bakery’s connective tissue extended beyond the brother-sister team. The Dogus both credit the tight-knit trio with bringing Sub Rosa to its present reality. “They really have created a kind of hive mind among the three of them,” Evrim says.
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A Bakery Reborn
Viewed from its threshold, the reopened Sub Rosa is familiar and yet transformed. The walls, once muted and rustic, served as a blank canvas for the bread and pastries to shine. Now the renovated interior declares its own soulfulness and artistry. A feature of the original bakery — a hand-plastered wall — has been restored by its creator, Tony Brown of local design studio Abode, for the first time since the 2013 fire. And an installation of hand-painted tiles adorns the walls behind and across from the pastry counter.
The tilework, an eye-catching melange of abstract shapes and earthy colors, was created by artist Pallavi Sen, a professor of art at Williams College in western Massachusetts. Sen and a group of her students produced and installed the work. Each of the nearly 1,000 tiles was hand-painted, with colors layered three times in a painstakingly slow process to create the vivid umbers, siennas and cobalts that suffuse the striking tableau.
If we felt that changing the oven would alter the soul of our bakery or the essential character of our baked goods, we wouldn’t do it.
—Evrim Dogu
The work is Sen’s love letter to Sub Rosa, a third space that welcomed the artist when she was a stipend-dependent graduate student in Virginia Commonwealth University’s sculpture program. She and fellow sculptor Ryan Flores would pool their money to split loaves of Sub Rosa’s classic bread — a luxury neither could afford on their own. Over time, she befriended the bakery staff.
“I felt there was a kind of distinct character to the place. And I loved the people who worked there, and I loved how interested they were in food,” Sen says. “To find a place like Sub Rosa, I was so happy and so excited to meet so many people who loved eating and loved cooking, and so I kind of just fell in love with the bakery.”
When Sen visited for a solo show at 1708 Gallery in spring 2025, she reconnected with Evin. “Evin was describing the tiles they were thinking of for a backsplash, and I said, ‘May I please, please, please make the tiles?’” she recalls. “I just felt audacious and pitched myself as the person for it. I’ve always wanted to make something for the bakery as a way to be close to people I love so much.”
Sen’s work is replete with little hidden gifts for Evin, Evrim and the larger Sub Rosa community. The bakery’s seeded braid inspired the woven strands at the top of one section of tile. Within those strands are essential elements of the operation — wheat and corn — as well as delicate details like a crescent moon. On another tile, a woman’s profile faces a blue dot meant to represent a blueberry, a nod to the blueberry tarts Sen remembers devouring during summer visits to Sub Rosa.
There are subtle references, as well. Tucked behind the proofing station, a collection of tiles reveals a special message for Evrim in Latin: “Igne natura renovatur integra.” The phrase, which translates to, “Through fire, nature is reborn whole,” serves as an apt metaphor for Sub Rosa’s transformation.
“The phrase reminds me that the fire didn’t just destroy something,” Evrim says. “There’s this other level where the fire is actually the spirit of the thing. It’s the ignition of what we do that creates meaning for us. I was really hungry for that to be true for the bakery, and it has turned out to be true.”
(Clockwise from left) Sub Rosa Classic loaf, lamb borek, poğaça, fig and cheese croissant, Rustica baguette
The Essentials
Five of Sub Rosa’s signature bakes
Sub Rosa Classic Loaf
Inspired by the classic French pain au levain, this naturally leavened bread is created with a cultured starter and nutritious high-extraction flour made from regional wheat. The result is a hefty loaf with a wide ear (the flap of crust exposed when the loaf is scored before baking), a gentle tang and an airy crumb with a satisfying chew.
Lamb Börek
Rooted in the Dogus’ heritage, this hybrid pastry blends Turkish flavors with French technique. Börek typically uses a phyllo-style dough to encase fillings such as feta cheese, potatoes or ground meat. Sub Rosa’s version employs a French-style pastry dough stuffed with a savory mixture of Meadow Pride Farm ground lamb and spices before being baked.
Poğaça
A traditional Turkish breakfast bread, poğaça (pronounced “po-cha”) falls between a pastry and a biscuit, with a somewhat crumbly interior often enveloping a savory filling — in this case, a blend of feta cheese and herbs. The Dogus use their grandmother’s recipe for this taste of home.
Fig & Cheese Croissant
Shaped into a stunning pinwheel, this croissant balances the sweetness of Croatian fig jam with the earthy funk of award-winning Appalachian cheese from Meadow Creek Dairy in Galax. Together, the ingredients represent a nexus of Balkan and Virginian flavors and classic French technique.
Rustica Baguette
Sub Rosa’s take on a baguette is its only loaf made with commercial yeast, rather than natural leavener, and the dough undergoes a long fermentation to create a crackly crust. It was inspired by Seylou Bakery in Washington, D.C., and made with a recipe from friends at Sparrowbrush Bakery in Livingston, New York.
