After more than a decade of baking out of home and cloud kitchens, cult-favorite bake-to-order cookie and bread pudding dealer Brady’s Bakery will finally have a permanent home. Named after owner Reece Scelfo’s pet boxer, the bakery will open in Echo
Park sometime in spring 2027, next door to the latest location of Italian sandwich shop Ggiata.
Scelfo started baking in his West Hollywood home in 2015 after feeling disenchanted with his corporate career in the entertainment industry. “One day, I walked up to rock and roll Ralphs on Sunset and got all the makings for red velvet cake, which is my favorite cake,” he says. “I just used a fork and cereal bowl to make everything, and it came out pretty bad, but I was just having such a ball.” Soon after that first bake, his new hobby turned into creative business pursuit as Scelfo began selling cakes, cupcakes, cookies, and eventually bread pudding. Scelfo officially founded Brady’s Bakery in 2016, spending his lunch breaks delivering cookie orders and baking in the evenings. In 2018, he quit his job and became a full-time home baker, but quickly found that his oven limited his output. “I used to just take naps in front of the oven,” Scelfo says. “I could only bake 18 cookies at a time in my home oven, but I was getting these orders for like 1,000 cookies.”
Brady’s Bakery outgrew Scelfo’s home kitchen, and, in 2019, he signed a lease to open at a forthcoming Cloud Kitchens location near the University of Southern California. After numerous delays, the kitchen opened in March 2020 — but just two weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down restaurants across the country and the bakery lost all its wholesale accounts. Still, Brady’s Bakery was optimized for takeout- and delivery-only on the apps, meaning Scelfo could keep operating, and the business exploded. “It was me and two part-timers and then over the next year or two, I grew to eight full-time people,” Scelfo says. In the next few years, Brady’s Bakery moved to a ghost kitchen in Echo Park before expanding into a commissary kitchen in Glendale, with takeout outposts in Culver City and Hollywood, plus national delivery.
When the opportunity to open in Echo Park presented itself, Scelfo jumped at the chance. “I’ve searched for years and came really close with some landlords, just didn’t come to agreement or for whatever reason,” he says. “Life happens, and things fall through. But this one, I walked in, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the space next to Ggiata. Are you kidding me?’” When it opens, Brady’s Bakery will serve its core lineup of cookies: chocolate chip and sea salt, the cream cheese frosting-stuffed Doughboy, a gluten-free peanut butter and jelly cookie, and the Nutella-filled OMFG. Bread pudding flavors will span chocolate chunk, cinnamon roll, the banana-pecan That’s Bananas, and the carrot-cake-inflected Bad Bunny. Over the next eight-or-so months, Scelfo hopes to flex his baking muscles and expand the menu with items such as buttermilk biscuits, baguettes with butter and jam, and cinnamon rolls. The cafe will also serve cold brew, drip coffee, and homemade horchata. “I’m not even like, ‘Oh, this is such a cute place for a first storefront.’ Scelfo says. “No, this is the spot. I can die here, and I probably will. I will be there forever.”
Since its inception, being a queer-owned and operated business has been at the heart of Brady’s Bakery. “I grew up in a place where I didn’t know if I would ever be loved, accepted, appreciated,” Scelfo says. “I mean, I grew up in this small town in Texas and I just never knew how the world would accept me or not.” Now, he hopes to shape a space that celebrates his identity and welcomes the wider gay and trans community. “I was so afraid to be myself for so long,” he says. “The fact that I have this very public-facing business where I get to slap on a business card or a phone board at a pop-up or our website or our Instagram — ‘Gay-owned and operated, gay as fuck, LGBTQ owned and operated since forever.’ — I’m so proud to do that.”
As Scelfo spends the next few months preparing to open the doors in Echo Park, he’s already looking forward to having people in the space. “I’m just a community person,” he says. “I cannot wait to be there and see people walk through the door, see what they’re enjoying and what they want, talk to them, and get to know them.”
