Sap Sua Co-Owner Steps Into the Spotlight With Debut of The Bakehouse

“‘It has to be craveable,” says Anna Nguyen, who co-owns the Vietnamese eatery Sắp Sửa at 2550 East Colfax Avenue with her husband, Ni. Now the restaurant will open on weekend mornings as the Bakehouse, marking Nguyen’s return to her roots.

Craveability is a lesson passed down from Nguyen’s longtime mentor, Nancy Silverton of Osteria Mozza and Chi Spacca in California. As a baker, she wants her creations to be overwhelmingly delectable, with a lingering fixation that stays on the mind throughout the day. To that end, some of her recipes have been fine-tuned for over a decade.

Pumpkin bars, for example, go all the way back to Nguyen’s high school days. “I’ve tweaked the recipe a little bit here and there — adjusted the salt, adjusted some of the spices and made the frosting less sweet.” Other reliable hits, such as lemon olive oil cake and densely packed apple cake, are throwbacks from the Cherry Creek Farmers Market in 2015, where Nguyen and her mother tested out her baking style for local crowds.

The Bakehouse marked its grand opening on November 18, and while patrons can pick up muffins, tea cakes, turnovers, cookies and more to go, they can also enjoy them inside the restaurant’s 4,000-square-foot space as French cafe tunes float through the dining room. “I like being able to sit in a bakery, which is becoming harder and harder to find as bakeries get priced out,” Nguyen notes.

The beverage selections at the Bakehouse include artisanal tea made with botanicals sourced from Japan and China, from San Francisco-based Red Blossom Tea Company.
In addition, it has collaborated with Tí Cafe, which provides Vietnamese iced coffee, phin (pour-over espresso) and the highly-instagrammable cafe trứng, a Vietnamese-style egg coffee. Nguyen explains, “You whip an egg yolk and sweetened condensed milk, pour it over really strong black coffee. Stir it, and it basically makes a coffee milkshake. It’s fantastic.”

Nguyen grew up in Longmont, and her parents have always been her biggest champions. Her father used family vacations to cultivate his children’s taste for adventure and culinary curiosity; “career development” meant exploring little towns for neighborhood bakeshops in pursuit of genuine flavors, Nguyen recalls.

Her mother set a high standard and taught her to develop an impeccable palate. The Bakehouse preserves the family legacy with variations of Nguyen’s mother’s pecan sandies, her paternal grandmother’s nutmeg sugar cookies, and other time-honored favorites.

By age nineteen, Nguyen was baking professionally under the tutelage of Amy Corliss, owner of the Little Bird Bakeshop. “[Corliss] was so good about just letting me work on new items for the [pastry] case. We’d R&D a small batch, get it to where we were really happy with it, and then it would just be in the case,” Nguyen recalls. “To have somebody take me as I was, give me the space to try things, and also to make a lot of mistakes but still with the patience to help me get better, was such a joy, honestly.” To this day, Nguyen adds, she models herself after Corliss’s example.
During her time with the Little Bird Bakeshop, Nguyen’s cookbook hero was Nancy Silverton, whose book Pastries From the La Brea Bakery set the standard. “The balance of sweetness, salt — interesting flavors, but not weird. Everything was unique but not fussy,” Nguyen says.

After a move to California in 2015, she was dead set on working for Silverton, eventually landing an intern position at Osteria Mozza. “[Silverton] just turned out to be such a good friend and a mentor, and taught me so much about style and taste and finding perfect ingredients, not necessarily just local ingredients,” Nguyen says. Among the options at the Bakehouse are her riffs on Silverton’s coffee cake and fennel ricotta muffins.

Even though the Bakehouse diverts from the Vietnamese flavors that are at the heart of Sắp Sửa, years of studying the cuisine has helped Nguyen embrace ingredients seen as taboo in Western professional circles, like food coloring.
In rural Vietnam, cooks use food coloring to dress up humble dishes, because the priority is the dining experience, no matter how simple the recipe. Similarly, explains Nguyen, she uses food coloring, sprinkles and other whimsical flourishes at the Bakehouse, so that wide-eyed little kids can peek into the case, take in the bright and colorful treats and declare, “I want that one.”

Ultimately, the Bakehouse is an emotional homecoming, Nguyen says. “In L.A., it’s easy to get caught up in the notoriety of everything,” she notes. “Coming back here was so much of settling in to what’s important to us.”

If Sắp Sửa is a love letter to Vietnamese flavors, then the Bakehouse is a scrapbook — a delicious catalogue of Nguyen’s journey from Colorado bakeries and local markets out to California’s Michelin-starred restaurants and back home. “It’s what I like to do with my hands during the day,” she says. “It’s the thing in the world I love to do the most.”

The Bakehouse at Sắp Sửa is located at 2550 East Colfax Avenue and is open from 8 a.m. to noon Saturday and Sunday. For more information, visit sapsua.com.