Since the early 2000s, Adrian Mendoza has cook his way to the top of pastry programs at restaurant companies in San Diego and Los Angeles. Now, he has brought all of his skills to his own table with the opening of Knead, an artisan bakery and scratch kitchen that opened Sept. 3 on the ground floor of downtown’s Symphony Towers.
Open from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays, the quick-service Knead bistro serves about two dozen varieties of fresh-baked daily pastries, mini- and full-size bread loaves, as well as breakfast burritos, acai bowls, salads, coffees and more. There are gluten-free and vegan items and the lunch specialty is artisan sandwiches made with bread baked fresh that morning.
While it’s still early days, Mendoza said some of the most-popular items with customers so far are the strawberry chip cookies, baguettes, sandwiches, croissants, seasonal hand pies and gluten-free items like coffee cake, banana bread and focaccia.
Knead is a project of the University Club atop Symphony Towers, a 1,500-member private club for business professionals founded in 1909. Since May of last year, Mendoza has served as the club’s executive pastry chef, where he has overseen pastry menus for all of the club’s culinary events.
Now with the opening of Knead, University Club is operating a restaurant open to the public. The Club has also become the food concessionaire for the San Diego Symphony, which will reopen its newly renovated Jacobs Music Center on the north side of the Symphony Towers building on Sept. 28.
Knead is the dream project of Mendoza and Brian Lee, who has served as general manager of the University Club since July 2020. Before that, Lee worked with Mendoza at several San Diego restaurants owned by the Puffer Malarkey Collective and the Hakkasan Group, including Herb & Eatery, an all-day bakery café that showcased Mendoza’s pastry skills. After Herb & Eatery shut down permanently in March 2020 when the pandemic hit, Lee said he started talking to Mendoza about his plan to someday open their own place together.
“I was in Adrian’s ear ever since 2020,” Lee said. “We didn’t have closure when Herb & Eatery shut down. This was going to be Herb & Eatery 2.0. For me it’s like this has taken 4-1/2 years to come to fruition.”
Mendoza said it’s been a lot of hard work opening Knead — which replaced the Symphony Towers bistro that shuttered in March 2020 — but he’s excited to be running his own kitchen for the first time, and he’s grateful for Lee’s vision in making it happen.
“He has given me the liberty to do my own thing,” Mendoza said. “It’s been better than I even expected. I’m thankful to Brian for believing in me and giving me the opportunity to show what I can do.”
Mendoza, 39, is well-known around San Diego for his pastry and baking skills, with many fans saying he makes the best croissants in town. Mendoza was born in Corona and raised in Apple Valley, where he started his culinary career in his teens, flipping burgers at McDonald’s. At 18, he moved to San Diego to start on a culinary degree at the Art Institute of California-San Diego.
He credits his 20+-year career to many former bosses who believed in him and mentored him along the way.
They include chef-restaurateur Brian Malarkey, who gave Mendoza his first professional job as a prep cook at Oceanaire Seafood Room in the Gaslamp Quarter in 2008, then brought him back to be a lead pastry chef for Puffer Malarkey Collective from 2013 to 2020; baking legend Sherry Yard, who trained and mentored him in pastry at several Wolfgang Puck-owned restaurants in L.A. from 2009 to 2013; master baker Crystal White, who hired him as a kitchen manager at Wayfarer Bread & Pastry in La Jolla in September 2020; and Urban Kitchen Group owner Tracy Borkum, who hired him as her restaurant company’s R&D chef in 2021.
Although Mendoza said his time at Wayfarer during the pandemic was tough — working in a face mask in a hot kitchen turning out 1,000 pastries a day for customers lined up around the block — that is where White taught him the art of bread-making.
“It was the first time in my career I wasn’t making plated desserts,” Mendoza said. “It was a culture shock but I loved the repetition of it. It was such a cool experience.”
White and Borkum also taught Mendoza the importance of baking every day with the goal of perfection. “It taught me the importance of consistency for repeat customers. I learned how to do it right,” he said.
Now he’s ready to take everything he’s learned from others to lead his own 12-member team at Knead, which includes a six-member baking team who work in a basement-floor prep kitchen.
Building a state-of-the-art bakery is expensive, but Knead got a financial boost from Lee. In the summer of 2022, Lee was enrolled in a monthlong Enterprise Leaders program at the University of Nevada Las Vegas’s William F. Harrah College of Hospitality. The students’ final project was to create a pitch for a restaurant concept and Lee submitted his plan for Knead. His project won first place, which included a grant to help build out the restaurant.
Mendoza has been asked a lot about whether Knead will open on the weekends. For now, there is no plan. Instead he and Lee are focused on growing the weekday crowds, which at present is mostly tenants in the building and University Club members.
“It’s all pretty much word of mouth right now, but we’re encouraged,” Lee said.
Knead Artisan Bakery
Hours: 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Mondays-Fridays. Grand-opening festivities are planned on Monday
Address: Symphony Towers, 750 B St., Suite 150, downtown
Online: instagram.com/kneadbakerysd
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