Good Taste is a menu for eating well in the Bay Area. This week, we’re excited to share the return of Honey & Pearl, the delectable South Bay pop-up bakery that’s now setting permanent roots down in Emeryville. Subscribe to our newsletters, including Good Taste, for more weekend-exclusive food & drink news delivered to your inbox.
After a few years of looking for the perfect kitchen to bring back their Honey & Pearl baking business, Tamara Esparza and her husband Vinnie Esparza found it in Emeryville. They will soon start accepting new orders for weekend pickups. This is a personal favorite, and not just because we are both named Tamara and pronounce it the correct way.
Honey & Pearl’s new online shop will open on Wednesday, and the first pickup days for orders in Emeryville will be on October 25-26. The fall dessert menu includes a caramel upside-down cake, the best banana pudding ever made (my words), a plant-based mocha cookies & cream cake, cookie butter brownie bars, a pumpkin swirl crunch mini Bundt, a coconut pineapple cake slice, chocolate Boston cream pie, and the otherworldly guava chiffon cake that was the calling card of H&P’s San Jose business a few years back.
Very reasonable prices—starting at $4.75 for a dessert cup and going up to $24 for a six-inch guava chiffon cake and $36 for the Boston cream pie—stand out from other Bay Area bakeshops. Tamara has lots of ideas, including savory items such as quiche and sausage rolls, that she would eventually like to introduce to the menu as well.
“When we bake, I don’t want to exclude anybody,” Tamara says. “I want everybody to be able to enjoy something, so that’s why our products are fairly priced and you can get yourself a little treat. I don’t say, ‘Hey, you have to order an X amount before you can do pickup.’ I want everybody to be able to enjoy all the products that we make.”
Dessert catering and special event cakes (including affordable wedding cakes) are on their future radar as well, and they’re open to inquiries once they find their footing with this new shop. When they used to bake once or twice a month in San Jose, pre-orders would sell out right away, and Tamara and Vinnie would work 27-hour shifts out of a shared kitchen to get everything ready. Having this new space that’s theirs will allow them to work more humane hours. I’m guessing that many of their South Bay customers are going to make the drive to Emeryville to be reunited with these desserts.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and opening in this month has extra significance for Tamara. She is a survivor, has served as a commissioner on the Domestic Violence Council for Santa Clara County, and hopes to one day start a foundation teaching job and entrepreneurship skills to survivors so that they can start their own businesses, too.
“It was a hope that kept me alive and I want people to know why this business is so important to me,” she says. “It’s not just because we woke up one day and said we wanted to bake. 18 years ago in October, I moved out of a battered woman’s shelter with my four children into our own home.
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“What kept me alive during those times was that hope of when I get out of the situation, I am going to have a business, I am going to finally have something for myself and my children. The way that I was able to get out of that situation is because I had a skill set. I knew how to bake and I knew how to cook so I could get a job. Baking really did save my life. Opening in October 18 years later feels so good! It really is a dream fulfilled.”
Tamara Palmer also publishes the California Eating and Food Book Club newsletters.
