Every Friday, in a corner of Truckee where you’d least expect it, you can find a line of people queuing up in front of a storefront. It can easily be 50 people deep and stretch down the block, and customers happily wait almost an hour for their turn. They wait in summer with their kids and dogs in tow, and in winter bundled up, enduring rain and snow.
What is this business, you ask, and what makes it so special?
It’s Sierra Bakehouse, located off the beaten path in the Pioneer Center, and it’s one of a handful of Truckee businesses that are only open to the public one day a week.
“People line up in droves, rain or shine; even in the dead of winter people will be out there when it’s 10 degrees out or 7 in the morning,” said Emily Clark, who owns Valhalla Vintage next door to Sierra Bakehouse, which is also only open on Fridays.
While it seems counterintuitive to only be open one day a week, these owners turned to a once-a-week operation for three main reasons: the pandemic upended their original plans, their location is outside of the commercial core, and lack of enough full-time staff to do more days. Although two of the stores have other businesses that keep them afloat, all the owners seem content for now to operate on a limited basis.
Sierra Bakehouse
Daniella Rinaldi-Luchian and Kristy Kirsch, both trained bakers and pastry chefs, met while working at Coffeebar Bakery in Truckee in 2016. Two years later they opened Sierra Bakehouse, which originally was intended as a wholesale bakery. After a while they decided to open to the public but only one day a week.
“Originally we were doing so much wholesale, and we didn’t have a lot of foot traffic where we were located,” said Kirsch. “And we wanted to bake everything fresh. It’s hard to have a bakery open every day that has fresh products and can sustain that.
Then Covid hit and turned their business model upside down. Sierra Bakehouse’s wholesale business dried up, but their storefront started thriving. In fact, their brick-and-mortar space did so well on Fridays that Rinaldi-Luchian and Kirsch didn’t need to return to wholesale after the pandemic.
“Our model worked really well during Covid,” said Kirsch. “It gave people something to do to pick up their baked goods on Friday. We were getting busier and busier. We got so busy we didn’t reopen wholesale.”
Sierra Bakehouse is a small operation. Besides Rinaldi-Luchian and Kirsch, there are only two other full-time bakers along with four employees who help out on Fridays. They bake every day of the week except for Sunday. That one day of the week, when the bakery is open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., does enough business to keep Sierra Bakehouse going.
“With our current staff and production schedule, that is basically all we need to sustain,” said Kirsch. “We talked about changing it up and doing different things, but it works.”
In those 6 hours on Fridays, Sierra Bakehouse does a ton of business. On average they sell 350 loaves of bread, 250 croissants, hundreds of cookies and bars, and 200 of their various desserts in a single day.
The Friday queues have become a social event that benefits other neighboring stores. Customers get their coffee at neighboring Pacific Crest Coffee before standing in line, and visit adjacent stores like Valhalla Vintage and Love and Lupines, a flower shop only open on Fridays and Saturdays November through May, with occasional pop-up flower sales on Fridays in the summer.
“It’s a cool sense of community,” said Clark of Valhalla Vintage. “People run into friends. It feels like you are a part of something, a little circuit. You get your coffee, then go to the home goods store and get in line at the bakery. It’s a fun, one-stop shop on Fridays.”
Valhalla Vintage
Clark’s decision to only open on Fridays was influenced by customers flocking to Sierra Bakehouse that day. Since she started the vintage boutique in 2022, she experimented with being open every other day, or Fridays and Saturdays, but nothing worked as well as just Fridays.
“It’s really quite an industrial area,” Clark said about the Pioneer Center. “I was hoping it would become a cool, hip community, which it is, but only on Fridays when the bakery is open. They draw all the foot traffic.”
Clark, who was a sales rep for Ugg for 9 years and a merchandiser for Teva, has been addicted to thrifting for years. Whenever she traveled for work, she always stopped at thrift stores in her spare time. She acquired so many vintage pieces that she says it will take her a lifetime to sell all of them.
In 2019, Clark launched a vintage Etsy shop and opened the Sock Parlor in downtown Truckee with her husband. Her Etsy shop thrived, but during Covid the online vintage market was flooded. She contemplated opening a retail space for her vintage clothes but didn’t want to be downtown because of the high rents. When her Sock Parlor landlords, Katie and Ciro Mancuso, told her about a space at the Pioneer Center, which they also own, she jumped on it.
“I wanted a space to have a creative outlet, to foster my desire to find cool, vintage stuff, and to get it out of my house and offer it to the community,” Clark said.
She was already aware of the difficulty of hiring staff from operating the Sock Parlor, so Clark was fine with limited store hours.
“I was okay not being open all the time because I probably couldn’t find someone to run it all the time,” she said. “I wanted it to be more for the local community … I love the merchandise, they are one-of-a-kind pieces of history, really, and I want those who share the same idea of appreciation for it.”
Clark says Valhalla Vintage is more of a passion project and not particularly profitable, but people who love vintage clothing seek out her store. On good days, she can make half her rent in the four hours she’s open, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
She also gets a lot of customers from the bakery line.
“Women will have their husbands stand in line at the bakery while they shop at my store, but what I am hearing lately is that they shop at my place while they wait for the bakery line to go down,” said Clark. “People love the shop. It’s very nostalgic for a lot of people. It’s a special spot that people really appreciate.”
Cloud Sushi
Chef Josh Brown learned to make sushi when he was in college and hasn’t stopped slicing, dicing, and rolling since. He worked at Mamasake at Palisades Tahoe and Mikuni at Northstar, and he helped open Morgan’s Lobster Shack (all three restaurants are now closed).
In 2016, Brown started Tahoe Private Chef, which focuses on omakase (meaning “I will leave it to you” in Japanese), where diners enjoy one piece of sushi at a time selected by the chef, a trend popular in San Francisco. He also offered pop-up sushi nights two days a week at Copper Lane Cafe and Provisions at Northstar. It was just starting to catch on when the pandemic hit. During Covid, he was still using the kitchen there while looking for a place of his own.
In 2022, Brown heard that The Station, located on West River Street next to the train tracks, had closed. At first he just wanted the space as a commissary kitchen. But when he learned that the kitchen service window had been approved by the health department, he realized he could open to the public. Brown chose Wednesdays because that’s the day he receives fresh, high-end fish deliveries from Japan- and San Francisco-based companies that no other restaurants in the area use. He utilizes the rest of the week to focus on catering; this also lets him prioritize his staff, who all have other jobs, for weekend gigs.
Cloud Sushi is open from 12 to 7 p.m. on Wednesdays and has a pre-ordering system. While it’s not required, Brown recommends using it, especially for dinnertime. Cloud sells out most Wednesdays.
“Every restaurant that’s been here has failed because of the foot traffic issue,” said Brown. “That’s one reason I designed Cloud around pre-ordering. I am drawing people to it and not relying on them to walk by. I am creating the foot traffic.”
Brown has designed his sushi around takeout. Instead of tempura, which steams up everything when it’s put in a box, he uses panko.
“The concept is based around texture,” he said. “Our signature rolls all have a crispy component, but not tempura. We make it so it can survive the trip home and still be crunchy.”
Although Brown says Cloud Sushi is not extremely profitable, being open one day a week works, as it helps pay the rent for the kitchen for his private chef business, which is his bread and butter. Because he does not have a dining room — he shares the space with Tahoe Sports Hub — he can’t offer a full-time concept.
While Brown is contemplating finding a place where he can be open more days a week, or even changing the offerings to food that is more friendly to takeout, like burgers or sandwiches, for now he is sticking with the once-a-week idea.
“People realize we get all our fish fresh that day, they are not going to get three-day-old fish like at other restaurants,” he said. “Demand through scarcity is part of it, but being open more days would make it harder to do catering.”
