Eva's Bakery on the Rise 

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• Niki Chan
• Eva's Bakery manager Ruby Johnson and owner Charlie Perry

You can't miss the bright blue exterior of Eva’s Bakery, a French-style café, on Main Street. It’s a beacon of happiness on a block in transition—a respite from construction in downtown Salt Lake City.

The bakery specializes in breads, coffee and a limited menu of savory and sweet items for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Eva’s owner and chef Charlie Perry has bread in his blood. His family is part of Central Milling, an organic flour mill in Logan. Perry has been a baker and pastry chef most of his life, although, he recalls, “I didn’t want to bake full time, but I love the business and bakeries.”

After years away from the family business, and once his first restaurant—Eva, which offers small plates and craft cocktails for dinner—was operating efficiently, Perry knew it was time to step away and open a bakery.

His focus at Eva’s Bakery changes from month to month. “Lately I’ve been baking a lot more and refining the recipes,” Perry says. “A month ago it was the sourdough, but this month it’s all about the baguettes.”

The bakery produces a dozen different types of bread each day, which equates to 400 to 600 pounds of raw dough and somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 pieces of bread per day, from loaves to buns and croissants. Perry and his team not only bake for customers at the bakery itself, but also stock breads for Whole Foods stores in the Salt Lake valley, Liberty Heights Fresh and all Caputo’s Deli locations.

• Niki Chan

They also make all the breads for Rye restaurant as well as the buns for Beer Bar and a special bread for Valter’s Osteria—a light rustic Italian loaf with a crisp crust that has lots of cell structure, Perry says. In addition, many restaurants are now serving Eva’s Bakery breads at the table.

“We have restaurants we provide bread to, but that’s where I want to move forward,” Perry says. “The food scene has gotten so much better, and the only thing lacking is good bread. So we’re creating some new breads and artisan-style sprouted wheat.”

Now that Eva’s Bakery has perfected its production process and bread recipes to Perry’s satisfaction, bakery customers will also begin seeing daily bread specials, such as the kalamata olive bread, once again.

“We’re making quite a bit of bread, but we have the capacity to make a lot more,” Perry says. “There is room to grow but I want to grow in the right way.”

As the new fall menus roll out at Eva’s Bakery, including a new dinner menu offered Thursday through Saturday, expect to hear a lot more about Eva’s Bakery around town—it is most certainly on the rise.