It has been said and should be repeated: Hey Brother Baker has long been Long Beach’s most underrated bake space. Owners Jesse Hellen-Lloyd and wife Christina Wilson have finally opened their brick-and-mortar space after announcing they has secured a location on Anaheim Street in the Zaferia neighborhood.
Jesse and Christina birthed Hey Brother out of their garage as a hobby back in 2016. With a brother working at Outerlands, the famed San Francisco eatery that garnered a name for its farm-centric offerings and famed house sourdough, Jesse was beyond impressed. Like many in his generation, returning to the base knowledge on how to make certain foods was already embedded in his soul. He had experimented with beer. Cheese. Pickles. And bread offered an outright dream for someone who was a musical engineer: It requires a shit-ton of precision with definitively artistic slant.
And eventually joined by head baker Michael Simenson and helper Jojo Chu.
When it had reached excellence, Jesse’s baking style was rooted in restraint, repetition, and an almost stubborn respect for the fundamentals. He wasn’t chasing novelty for novelty’s sake; he was chasing feel: How dough responded to time. Or temperature. And definitively touch. His breads leaned toward the rustic and the traditional. Crackling crusts. Open crumbs. Gentle sourness. And shapes that wore their imperfections honestly.
What to expect from Hey Brother Baker’s new brick-and-mortar.
Yes, there are the mighty loaves: Perfect baguettes. Ciabatta. Fougasse. Alpine rye. Olive levain. Rose Street botard. Brioche. Jalapeño cheddar… All crafted across the past nine years via Jesse buying books and teaching himself through trial and error, Hey Brother Baker’s garage space scored a walk-in freezer and three stacked Rofco ovens.
“Yes, of course, there’s the bread,” Jesse said. “But what Michael has done with the pastries program has been incredible. His coffee cake is one of the best I’ve had… And then we’ve really honed in on our coffee program.”
He’s not lying with the coffee cake and pastries. A coffee cake whose butteriness is par none in the city. A raisin roll where the raisins are soaked in rum and orange. Savory, laminated folds stuffed with Japanese curry and potato. Morning buns that are marvelously sticky and nutty. Paired with their Mad Lab Coffee Roasters-led coffee program—go for the Chemex; worth it—and you have yourself a perfect morning ritual.
Hey Brother Baker arose in a year oft-forgotten as the year Long Beach took on bread by the grain’s horn.
It was 2018. Kristin Colazas was cooking out of Primal Alchemy’s kitchen in the wee hours. Arturo Enciso’s then-cottage bakery, Gusto, was selling stone oven-baked goods out of his Long Beach home. And Hey Brother Baker, a project former audio engineer Jesse started two years prior, had its first pop-up. 2018 was the year that birthed three of Long Beach’s strongest bakers—and Jesse was one of them.
Jesse and Christina (also a musician) approached bread the way someone might approach a musical instrument: by listening closely and practicing obsessively. They learned through trial, error, notebooks full of timing adjustments, and the quiet feedback loop between hands, heat, and fermentation. Without formal culinary schooling, they built their own curriculum: Reading. Baking. Failing. Recalibrating. Failing better. All until instinct began to take over where recipes left off. That independence shaped both his confidence and his humility; every bake was another lesson, every misstep another data point.
So first, it was the bread: baguettes, buns, country loaves… Then, the clients came: Heritage. Oh La Vache. Olive & Rose. Alder & Sage. The now-shuttered Union at Compound. The now shuttered Commodity (currently home to Good Time). The now shuttered Berlin Bistro…
More than anything, Hellen-Lloyd loved the art of bread as a living process. He respected its slowness, its resistance to shortcuts, and its refusal to be rushed. That reverence showed up in the way he spoke about fermentation, in the hours he devoted to shaping and timing, and in the consistency of what came out of his ovens day after day. For him, bread wasn’t just a product—it was a craft built on patience, repetition, and a quiet obsession with doing the same thing a little better every single time.
Long Beach is in a bread and baking renaissance.
If anyone questions the bread and baking renaisssances happening in the city—despite the closure of the long-loved Babette’s—here are some of the stellar places Hey Brother Baker will be joining:
- Colossus in Belmont Shore might have been through some city permitting stumbles that disappointed patrons and fellow food lovers alike, but Chef Kristin Colazas Rodriguez is doing just fine, having opened a yet another location in San Pedro.
- Nonna Mercato, Chef Cameron Slaugh’s Italian-meets-French concept in Bixby Knolls, has some of the city’s best baked goods. If you haven’t had their country loaf that is used for their sister space’s French toast at The Attic you must.
- Ammatoli in Downtown Long Beach isn’t just one of the best restaurants. Its dessert program from Chef Massah Habibehboasts of perfected carrot cake, olive oil lemon cake, date cookies, baklawa, and more.
- Long Beach’s Gusto bakery, the Latin American-centric space that overtly overthrows Eurocentric ideals when it comes to baked goods, is one of the defining parts of our baking scene. Even more, it officially became a finalist for Outstanding Bakery at the James Beard awards—for the second time. After nabbing a nod and eventually making it into the finalist category in the 2024 process, the bakery is once again up for a potential medal at this year’s 2025 awards.
Hey Brother Baker will be located at 3929 E. Anaheim St. It is currently operating under soft opening hours, with plans to expand later:Tuesday: 8AM to 2PM. Wednesday: 8AM to 5PM. Thursday: 8AM to noon. Friday and Saturday: 7AM to 2PM.
Lovely review! I call my yeasted products that I make my “bread babies” while they are rising.