How many badass bakers can one modest hamlet support? Seems Charlottesville is determined to find out.
Christina Martin comes to Charlottesville trailing a wake of Michelin-starred experiences by way of the West Coast and Chicago. She most recently wrapped a short stint at The Inn at Little Washington.
Now, Martin’s putting out pastries under her microbakery label, BakerNoBakery, and stalking the local farmers’ markets while plotting her next move.
K&F: So, you’re a baker with no bakery?
CM: Actually that was an Instagram name that originated in high school, when I was making pastries—mostly cakes and cookies—for birthdays. I’ve just kept it up, through culinary school at Johnson & Wales University, through some internships, and up to now.
Your most recent restaurant stop was The Inn at Little Washington. Where were you before that?
I got a great internship at Grace in Chicago. I moved there in the middle of my junior year and was finishing my bachelor’s degree online. The restaurant closed six days later. It was a hard and fast reset for my career. I helped open two restaurants and closed two in a year and a half and worked at a total of four. It was intense. Then I moved back home to the San Francisco Bay area. When the pandemic hit, the restaurant I was going to work for in L.A. ended up having its opening pushed back. My cousins own Guajiros Miami Eatery here in C’ville, and I was doing bakery pop-ups at the time out of my parents’ house; my cousins said I should come and do pop-ups out of their restaurant.
And then you just happened upon a job at another three-Michelin-starred restaurant.
I booked all my travel and had a sublet set up, but it was a scam. I needed a job and saw an opening as the pastry chef de partie at The Inn at Little Washington. I had been in fine dining of that caliber, so it was a linear move.
How did you get from there to your own business?
Through my pops-ups I started wholesaling cookie dough to my cousin. Then, because I had worked in multiple cities and met a lot of people, I started shipping bread—sending all these flavors and fun things I was working on around the country. And Charlottesville was drawing me in.
But you left the Inn.
I love the environment of fine dining, but I really believe my path in life lies with being an entrepreneur, as scary as it is. So, currently I’m doing production out of a commercial kitchen from 3-7:30am three days a week. I still think of myself as a baker without a bakery. With the way my creativity is, retail doesn’t really work. I enjoy the free form of the farmers’ market. Then I can spend my weekdays foraging or going to source ingredients.
What’s your baking style?
I like to describe it as Americana-diversity. I work with a lot of traditional American and French techniques but modify them, incorporating the diversity that is this country. I’m half Latin and half white but grew up in the Bay Area, where there are a lot of Asian and Hispanic influences, as well as modern gastronomic techniques.
Speed round: favorite pastry to eat, favorite local pastry, favorite pastry to bake.
I love a perfectly executed kouign-amann. It’s a French pastry that is laminated like a croissant, but the last two folds are done with sugar instead of flour, giving it this caramelly crust. The matcha mint chocolate chip cookie from Bowerbird is ridiculously good. And I love baking caramel buns because laminating by hand is a really fun process, and it’s different every time.