After months of planning, permitting and proofing both building designs and the dough, the day has finally arrived.

Reunion Bakery is now open on South Pearl Street.

The James Beard-nominated bakery opened on Saturday with grand fanfare and a line of excited fans waiting outside its doors on 1240 S. Pearl St. before it opened. The baked goods sold out by 11:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Sunday. 

“My first sight of relief was this weekend,” said Reunion Bakery owner Ismael de Sousa, wearing an apron and rubbery shoes dusted with flour on Tuesday. “We did it.”

The bakery has become famous for its Portuguese custard tarts called pastel de natas, Venezuelan sticky buns and its croissants. With the expansion, it grew its menu to include brunch options such as sourdough toast with goat cheese, roasted almonds and Colorado seasonal preserves or a fattoush-inspired sandwich with kale, mint, parsley, olives, cucumbers, za’atar and goat cheese.

Reunion Bakery first opened in 2018 at the market hall within Source Hotel in the River North Arts District, where it ceased operations in March to make way for the expansion. De Sousa, who was raised in Venezuela, recalled how he spent most of his savings to start the business and had few friends or family in the country to show up and support him in Reunion’s early days.

It didn’t take long before his small bakery got the attention of a national food magazine. In 2019, Bon Appétit named it one of America’s 50 best new restaurants.

“That was a game changer,” he said. “And from then on, I realized we needed a bigger space so we could produce more and better.” 

By late 2024, Reunion Bakery signed a lease on South Pearl Street, a thriving business corridor within a south Denver neighborhood that has grown as a culinary destination and is home to two Michelin-star restaurants. 

De Sousa said South Pearl Street feels more like a community than RiNo does. The neighborhood north of downtown is filled with many transient out-of-state residents who rent apartments and are passing by Denver and the portion of Brighton Boulevard where the Source Hotel is located doesn’t have a lot of pedestrian traffic, he said. Their new home in Platt Park is surrounded by houses and residents who walk around, especially for the street’s famous farmers’ market.

“This feels better. There’s more businesses to support what we do,” he said. “It just feels more like a neighborhood and more like a proper community.”

Still, it took more than 17 months to get the space across the finish line. The building home to the new Reunion Bakery was built in 2021, and the retail space was just a shell that had no electrical, plumbing, drainage, bathrooms or walls. Everything had to be prepared from scratch.

De Sousa said he wouldn’t recommend other restaurateurs to open a business this way because of how long it took, but there was one big benefit of sticking to this route: complete freedom in building it out.

With the new space, Reunion Bakery can have larger equipment and refrigerated displays to meet the necessary health codes to sell tarts and cakes — something difficult to do at its smaller space at the Source Hotel.

The made-from-scratch bakery now has more natural lighting, a small shop of baking goods and cookbooks from Colorado-based makers, and a fully open view of how products are made in-house. 

Most bakeries may hide the kitchen away from customers, but de Sousa said he wanted their production to be completely transparent. People can see how clean the kitchen is, what products they use and “it’s just fun” to watch the process.

He said the expansion will help Reunion Bakery achieve what it has always wanted to achieve: Not just being the best bakery in Denver, but the best in the world. 

“That sounds crazy,” de Sousa said. “That sounds like a child saying that, but I really believe that.”