Downtime Bakery to open in Mount Airy this summer

Northwest Philly has a constellation of good bread bakeries — Baker Street, Merzbacher’s, the recently opened Dead King Bread — but it’s slated to get a new star in the coming months: Downtime Bakery, the pop-up supplier of sourdough breads and bagels from former Eater Philly editor Dayna Evans, has found a brick-and-mortar home on Germantown Avenue in Mount Airy. It’s tentatively slated to open in the summer.

Evans and partner Sam Carmichael signed the lease on the space at 6624 Germantown Ave. in November. They’re converting the former insurance office into a retail bakery that will have room for café seating. Besides sourdough baguettes, batards, bagels, and sandwich breads, Evans plans to offer focaccia and bagel sandwiches, cookies, drip coffee, and seasonal hot dog and hamburger buns.

Downtime will join an increasingly busy block in Mount Airy. Neighbors include Adelie Coffee House, Zsa’s Ice Cream, Pax Flora Goods, Winnie’s Bike Repair, Mount Airy Violins & Bows, and the forthcoming Perennial Refill Hub, a sustainability store akin to East Passyunk’s Good Buy Supply. The city’s first Grocery Outlet opened at the end of the block in 2021.

Evans, a Delco native who spent 15 years working in New York as a writer, has been running Downtime out of her house in Mount Airy for two years, but her baking escapades date back even further. While working as a freelance copywriter in New York in 2017, she started Permanent Bake Sale, baking loaves of sourdough in her apartment kitchen, delivering them to customers by bike, and donating the proceeds to various nonprofits.

Her experimentation with bagels came about when Evans and Carmichael moved to Paris in late 2019. Bread and viennoiserie abounded, but “I really couldn’t get bagels that I wanted,” Evans said.

The couple decamped to Philly in June 2020, and Evans was hired as the editor at Eater in early 2021. The role presented an ideal way for Evans to reacquaint herself with the city’s food scene, but after about a year, the baking itch returned. Downtime debuted with crusty loaves of sourdough, six-packs of bagels, and deluxe chocolate chip cookies in January 2022. She sold out with ease.

By fall 2022, Evans was ready to make Downtime more full-time, so she left Eater and went freelance, which was at times a drag. Baking presented a marked contrast for Evans. “I was like, ‘Well, I like doing this thing. So how can I learn more about it and see if it’s something I really, really want to do?’”

That spring she put Downtime on hiatus and took on a full-time position at Machine Shop bakery in South Philly, where award-winning pastry chef Emily Riddell coached her through the art and intricacies of pastry and bread. “It’s just cool to be like in the space of someone who’s doing things of that caliber,” Evans said. “And from that — it’s funny, I learned so many skills that I didn’t have before — but I think the real takeaway was, ‘Oh, I love being in a bakery.’” Evans is a morning person, and the pace and work (and being away from a computer) was rewarding.

That discovery emboldened her to start seriously thinking about going brick-and-mortar. She and Carmichael had already been casually looking at spaces for lease. The first time they toured the 6624 Germantown Ave. location, pre-Machine Shop, it felt too big and too daunting. But when they circled back in fall 2023, Evans felt differently. “Even though it is terrifying and there is a lot of work that we need to do, I was like, ‘We can do it.’”

Evans and Carmichael were encouraged not only by the fellow small businesses on the emerging block but also the fact that their landlords would be Mount Airy’s Community Development Corp. This could be the perfect place for us, they thought.

The couple is working with an architect to transform the 1,600-foot-space, the lion’s share of which will be devoted to production. Aside from rejiggering the building’s infrastructure to support a bakery as opposed to an office — the water heater was “tabletop-sized,” Evans said — they’re getting in mixers, ovens, and more.

“It’s a lot of just learning as we go,” Evans said.

In the meantime, keep an eye on Downtime’s Instagram page for continued pop-ups and collaborations ahead of the bakery’s opening.