Fresh-baked dreams: Avery Ruzicka to open Manresa Bread and bistro in former Izakaya West End

Manresa Bread, a Campbell-based bakery with ties to the Michelin-starred restaurant of the same name, is expanding into a new hub in Santa Cruz’s Westside neighborhood — just blocks away from co-founder Avery Ruzicka’s home. 

As soon as next spring, Manresa Bread will expand its operations from its current 300-square-foot outpost on Ingalls Street into the former Izakaya West End restaurant. But that’s just the half of it – literally. The 4,000-square-foot space will be divided into two areas with two separate entrances. On one side, the bakery will offer domed loaves of levain and laminated pastries like kouign amann and croissants baked fresh on site daily from the morning until about 4 p.m. The other half of the space will be a restaurant that, to start, will serve dinner five nights a week and brunch on the weekends. Later, it hopes to open for lunch and expand dinner service to six nights a week, said Ruzicka. 

While the restaurant and bakery will share an address, the businesses will be “two different dining experiences,” Ruzicka said. By the time the bakery closes in the afternoon, the bistro — which will have its own name, to be announced at a later date — will open for happy hour and continue with dinner service. 

Both businesses are in the early stages of permitting, but without any significant remodels planned, Ruzicka hopes to open the bakery and the restaurant in spring 2026. Manresa Bread will open first, hopefully around Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day — and the bistro will ideally open a few weeks later, she said. 

Ruzicka’s will share ownership of both businesses with Manresa Bread’s business partners, Andrew Burnham and chef David Kinch — the group also owns Mentone in Aptos and The Bywater in Los Gatos — but she’s taking the lead at the restaurant and creating a menu of nourishing and straightforward dishes with French roots. While the menu is still being finalized, she envisions rotisserie-roasted chicken or porchetta with a pile of fries, bright green salads made with produce sourced from Santa Cruz farmers markets, and fried sardines or anchovies, depending on what Monterey Bay fishers are catching. There will be sandwiches on Manresa Bread and other baked treats from the bakery – bien sûr – as well as a burger made with a custom beef blend, steak frites, and vegetarian dishes made with heirloom beans. 

Once the smallest location, Santa Cruz’s Manresa Bread location will stand apart once it opens. Unlike the four other shops – in Palo Alto, Campbell, Los Gatos and Los Altos – the Westside spot will be the only Manresa Bread that bakes on site. It’s a change that the Manresa Bread team would like to bring to its other four locations eventually, and will allow them to deliver fresher products to customers in Santa Cruz County. 

“It’s always been a dream for me to be able to bake on site, and give a customer a warm croissant,” said Ruzicka. For years, she’s aspired to emulate bakery culture in European countries like France, Spain and England, with fresh loaves and treats produced twice a day. But because Manresa Bread’s business model focuses on a centralized bakery, that’s never been something it could do before. 

Ruzicka started Manresa Bread with Burnham and Kinch in 2013 while working at Manresa, Kinch’s Los Gatos restaurant, and soon started selling her sourdough bread and baked treats at area farmers markets. When the bakery opened its own locations and began distributing to clients throughout the Bay Area and into Santa Cruz, it established one central bakery in Campbell, and delivered items daily to Manresa Bread shops and clients like Verve Coffee Roasters and Cat & Cloud coffee. 

In 2022, Ruzicka, who has lived in Santa Cruz for 14 years, opened a shop on the Westside — the first on this side of “the hill.” The following year, Manresa Bread moved into a much larger commissary kitchen in Campbell, tripling its production space in order to accommodate rising demand for its wide-ranging menu of laminated pastries, rich cookies and holiday items like pies and panettone, all made with freshly milled flour. 

But when Izakaya West End closed in July after 12 years, Ruzicka, Kinch and Burnham jumped at the chance to expand in Santa Cruz. When it’s finished early next year, the new location will be a hub for the bakery to continue to expand throughout the Monterey Bay area. They will no longer drive daily to the bakery from Campbell once it opens. “All of the baking that is supporting Santa Cruz and the area will be coming out of there,” Ruzicka said. 

Being able to open a flagship bakery for Manresa Bread in her own neighborhood is meaningful to Ruzicka. “This opportunity to open this near the places that I already frequent and add something to this amazing energy on the Westside is really special,” she said. “I feel so lucky to be able to do this. And it’s such an incentive to try to make it exactly what I want it to be, and what I think people will enjoy.” 

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