Quail & Condor
Melissa Yanc won Food Network's Holiday Baking Championship in 2019 and turned the $25,000 into this bakery the next year. The ovens turn out long-fermented sourdough and laminated pastry, daily from 7am.2
Why go
Yanc and Sean McGaughey bootstrapped the place in 2020, mid-pandemic, after selling at farmers markets and pop-ups.2 She had run pastry for Bien Cuit in New York and Gjusta in Los Angeles and opened her first bakery at 23 in Denver.1 He spent over five years at SingleThread, Executive Sous and then Head Chef.1 That is why the counter reads like a restaurant's pastry section rather than a bread shop's. The Friday pop-ups they started in summer 2021 turned into Troubadour Bread & Bistro in 2022, which becomes a seven-course bistro called Le Dîner at night.1 The James Beard Foundation named the bakery an Outstanding Bakery semifinalist in 2025.3
Order this / avoid
- Order: the long-fermented sourdough. Time, temperature and premium ingredients is how the bakers describe their own method.1
- Order: a morning bun and an espresso tonic, which is the pairing the bakery puts first in its own description of the room.1
- Avoid: a late arrival in a busy week. In January 2025 the shop sold out by 11am and closed early.2
What locals & experts say
- Eleanore Park, The New York Times (24 December 2024), quoted by Sonoma Magazine: Yanc and McGaughey
run the gamut with luscious chocolate Champagne cakes, sourdough smacked with tang and pastries with lamination close to translucent.
2 - Melissa Yanc, on the James Beard nod, to the Sonoma Index-Tribune:
It's amazing to have earned it.
She said the nomination was a complete surprise.3
Good to know
- Hours: daily, 7am to 3pm, with online ordering through Toast.4
- The bakery moved. Older pieces give 149 Healdsburg Ave, a room Yanc called awkwardly shaped and short of space; it now trades on Mill Street.2
- Troubadour is the same owners, a boulangerie and coffee bar by day and a tasting menu at night.1
Verdict
should-visit — Two independent bodies put this bakery on a national list inside a year: the New York Times on 24 December 2024, then the James Beard Foundation as an Outstanding Bakery semifinalist in 2025. Eleanore Park's line does the convincing, because lamination close to translucent is a claim about the dough and not about the crowd. The kitchen behind it is a restaurant kitchen, with Sean McGaughey coming off five years to Head Chef at SingleThread and Melissa Yanc off Bien Cuit and Gjusta. It stops short of the top rung because nobody has published on the new Mill Street room, and the bakery has been open five years rather than fifty.