Bakery Four Opens March 19 on Tennyson, and You Should Be Very Excited

After months of delays caused mainly by supply-chain issues postponing the delivery of equipment, Bakery Four will open in an expansive new space at 4150 Tennyson Street at 8 a.m. on Saturday, March 19, marking the realization of a dream that's grown far beyond owner Shawn Bergin's expectations in just over two years.

With the help of his wife, Alex Urdanick, Bergin built Bakery Four into a tiny spot in Highland that drew longer and longer lines each week. While it's staying in the neighborhood, the new, much larger location will offer a whole lot more than just pastries and bread.

Bergin and Urdanick worked in different pizza places in upstate New York in their late teens and early twenties, which is when Bergin first became familiar with the process of making dough. While later living in Washington, D.C., and working as an executive for a co-working company, he began throwing pizza parties with friends — and that led him to try his hand at bread. "I was just on YouTube and Instagram and just messing with stuff all the time," he remembers. "The first loaf looked good, but it didn't have salt...but it just kept getting better and better."

Eventually, Bergin got frustrated with his corporate job; he and Urdanick, who had the option to relocate as an interior designer, decided to make a move. They looked at Austin as a possible new home, but "as soon as we got [to Denver], we fell in love with it," Bergin recalls.
Bergin resigned from his job with plans to focus on a cottage bakery, cooking bread and pastries out of a home kitchen. They moved in September 2019, and he began doing pop-ups that October. By February 2020, he'd signed a lease for Bakery Four's former Highland location. "We already knew we were going to start building out the space before COVID, then the pandemic kind of put a hyper-focus on small businesses," Bergin notes. "That helped us right off the bat, and then — I don't even know when it happened. It was just every day, the line was longer."

Word spread through social media about Bergin's prowess at turning out sourdough loaves, laminated pastries and other baked goods. "I've not spent a single penny on any type of advertising or anything," he says. "When we moved here, I had like 170 followers on Instagram, and now we have over 12,000."

What made Bakery Four's products stand out, especially at a time when new bakeries, cottage and otherwise, were popping up all over town? "I have no idea, because I've never worked at another bakery," Bergin replies. "When I started, I saw what I wanted, and I was like, 'I'm just gonna experiment until I get there.' And I was able to figure it out."

But beyond using the formulas and skills he's developed with practice, Bergin is adamant about finding the highest-quality ingredients possible. "You can't make a good loaf of bread with bad flour," he explains. Initially, he bought a mill and began grinding his own flour, but he soon realized that wasn't sustainable. While watching a YouTube video of Tartine bakery co-founder Chad Robertson, he spotted a bag of Cairnspring flour in the background. "That's how I tried that out for the first time," he recalls, "and I was like, 'This is it.'"

Bergin also uses Camas Country flour, and both products offer the quality and large quantities that he's going to need in the new bakery. With his new equipment and space, "We can bake sixty loaves at a time instead of eight. We can make 120 pastries at a time instead of 24," he says.
He also uses Isigny St. Mere, "the best butter I've ever had. I used to drive to the airport to pick up [the butter] that was flown in just for me," he recalls. Now, though, he's able to order it through a local food supplier that brought it on after learning that Bergin was going through so much of it.

All of the chocolate comes from Valrhona — "I tried a bunch of different brands, and that was just the best," Bergin notes. He also uses French sel gris sea salt, because it's "not an overly salty salt. It's really expensive, but it has a lot of flavor." And the water at the new location will be put through a filtration system. "Our loaves are 90 to 95 percent hydration," he explains. "So if you take that into consideration, if you have bad water, you can't make a good loaf of bread."

While his baked goods can be called sourdough, Bergin prefers the term "naturally leavened," because he's using the starter at a very young age, before it gets overly sour.

The new, 3,000-square-foot location on the ground floor of the Berkeley Hotel doesn't just mean more bread and pastries; Bergin can now expand far beyond baked goods. He plans to start simply, with a selection of five or six different pastries and one or two loaves a day. But he'll also be making bagels daily. (We fell in love with Bergin's bagels last summer, impressed with the crispy exterior and chewy interior that surpassed any other in the city.) He wants to try to offer doughnuts daily, as well; they were a Sunday-only special at the former location and a fan favorite.
As Bakery Four gets settled in, you'll also be able to get breakfast sandwiches and more lunch items. The space has room for a pizza oven, too, which Bergin wants to use to offer flatbreads. Burgers, grilled cheese and basically anything that's served on bread are also possibilities.

The space will serve coffee and tea, using beans from Denver-based Sweet Bloom as well as Oregon-based Heart Coffee Roasters. Along with prepared foods, Bakery Four will have a selection of dry goods and prepared foods to go, like jams, jellies and pasta made in-house using the sourdough starter.

Bergin also plans to use the space for dinner pop-ups, likely with friends AJ Shreffler of the popular Little Arthur's Hoagies pop-ups, David Right of Right Cream, and Dave Hadley of Samosa Shop. Self-dubbed "the chutney boys," the four have been helping each other with pop-ups since last year.

"We didn't know anyone when we moved here," Bergin recalls. "We had no friends. We just moved here because we wanted to move and we liked Denver." But through food, Bergin formed these relationships that he hopes to continue and grow through the collaboration possible at his new space. You may see quarts of Hadley's curries and jars of Shreffler's pasta sauce available at Bakery Four, too.

"It's been really surreal, because this is the first time in our life that everything is just happening. Yeah, we have a lot of obstacles, but everything is aligning, which is crazy," says Urdanick, who recently resigned from her interior design job to work the front counter at Bakery Four full-time.

"It's just hard work," Bergin adds. "We grew up with nothing, so this is just all us — which is crazy, because it's huge."

Bakery Four is located at 4160 Tennyson Street; initially, it will open at 8 a.m. daily. Visit bakeryfour.com or follow Bakery Four on Instagram for more information.