In just a few weeks, San Francisco’s Butter and Crumble will announce their November pastry lineup. The North Beach bakery specializes in savory and sweet pastries that take three days to produce. The dough is mixed, shaped, and rested, then laminated with blocks of Isigny Sainte-Mère beurre de tourage. After rolling, cutting, proofing, and baking, each pastry gets several finishing touches: a glaze, a garnish, a fresh grating of cheese.
Customers who visited last November may anticipate a comeback of the Stuffing Gravy Pain Suisse, Brie and Salami Bear Claw, Pumpkin Pie Twice Baked Croissant, and Cranberry Linzer Cookie Cruffin, among other seasonal delights.
Sophie Smith opened her North Beach bakery in October 2023, just a month before the busiest baking holiday of the year. We caught up with her last fall, right after her biggest Hotplate pie drop yet. All 150 pies were claimed in minutes, and the lucky customers had Pumpkin Pecan, Apple Custard, and Coffee Caramel Banana Cream pies secured for their Thanksgiving tables.
In the conversation below, Sophie reflects on a crazy first Thanksgiving, perfecting her puff pastry pie shells, and what it was like managing orders before switching to Hotplate.
An all-nighter and pie dough everywhere
Hotplate: Sophie, what do you remember about Butter and Crumble's first Thanksgiving?
Sophie: My goodness, it was quite the whirlwind. We did our first Thanksgiving with pretty much two employees, my boyfriend, and my dad.
We had no idea what we were doing. We were making pies in a way we'd never done before, making all of this pie dough by hand for hours on end. It turned into the first all-nighter of my entire life. I worked for maybe 48 hours straight. There was pie dough on the ceiling, the walls, the floor, and all over me. It was a crazy, crazy day.
Hotplate: And now, how do you feel about making pies?
Sophie: Wow. I've learned a lot over the past two years. Our first Thanksgiving happened about a month after we opened, so we were as unprepared as we could possibly be.
Last year we made our pies with puff pastry. Puff pastry is very similar to croissant dough, so it's more in my wheelhouse. I know how to make that dough and I know how to mass-produce it, so last year's pies went much more smoothly.
This year I'm really excited to do it again. We're doing three different flavors and focusing only on the pies, so I think we're going to be pie machines. We're going to get it done this year.
Hotplate: How many pies are you selling for Thanksgiving this year?
Sophie: We put up around 150 pies on Hotplate, something like that.
Hotplate: And how fast did they sell?
Sophie: From what I remember, almost immediately. And I'm still getting tons of requests to do another drop. At this point, we'll see how many we can produce in that amount of time, and if we have extras, we'll add them.
Leaving DMs and WordPress behind
Hotplate: Have you ever tried to take orders via DM?
Sophie: Oh god. Yeah. When I was first starting out, in the very early stages of my product, I—
Hotplate: The Westwood days?
Sophie: Even earlier, if you can believe it. I was taking orders via DMs. I stopped pretty quickly because it was so hard to keep track of. Then I started using a really outdated WordPress website that was so confusing. One Valentine’s Day we had a huge issue where nobody got charged. I had no money in the bank account, and I had to very awkwardly email everyone and say, “Sorry, I need your money.” So yeah, that experience was…
Switching to Hotplate
Hotplate: Do you remember when Rishi walked into the bakery two Thanksgivings ago?
Sophie: Yes, I could never forget that moment. It was so funny, because we'd been talking about how we had no idea how we were going to handle our Thanksgiving pre-orders. What I was doing at my pop-ups in the back of bars in the Marina wasn't going to work on a stage this big.
Then he walked in and named all these answers to my prayers. They were things I'd always wished were possible and couldn't figure out how to do myself, and Hotplate seemed to do all of them. So it was perfect.
Hotplate: Amazing. And now you do drops every week.
Sophie: We do drops every week, yes. And I want to say we have about 11,000 people on our notification list.
Hotplate: …I think you have more.
Sophie: Oh my goodness, crazy. But yeah, we couldn't do pre-orders in a sustainable way without Hotplate. It puts things more in our control, and we can set limits we can actually manage with our massive customer audience.
Ready to take the chaos out of your holiday preorders? Create your holiday drop →
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