When the bread oven exploded at Reunion Bread on Mother’s Day in 2023 — requiring a response from the fire department — it could have been the end of Ismael De Sousa’s business.
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Born to a Portuguese family and raised in Venezuela, De Sousa trained as a pastry chef in London and opened Reunion in 2019, bringing together all three cultural influences. Bon Appetit named Reunion one of the country’s best new restaurants that year, alongside The Wolf’s Tailor and Beckon, both of which have earned Michelin stars in the interim.
But in 2020, the pandemic nearly killed the bakery — just as it did many other restaurants. To make matters worse, De Sousa had signed a five-year lease inside The Source, a once wildly popular market hall that was quickly losing high-profile tenants and restaurants.
Instead of allowing the permanent loss of the expensive bread oven to stop him, though, De Sousa tricked out one of his remaining ovens so that it could handle some of the tasks that the specialized bread oven had performed — and he kept going.
“It’s a miracle that we have survived through those years,” he said.
Last week, De Sousa signed a new lease on a 1,500-square-foot storefront in a building at 1250 S. Pearl St., where he hopes to open a much larger operation — one where he can showcase more of his talents — by June 2025.
“The idea is that we are going to build a proper bakery with better equipment, a flagship space that reflects what we do,” De Sousa said, adding that the bakery’s name will be highlighted, as opposed to its spot at The Source, where business names aren’t listed outside the building. “You will be able to tell what it is. It is a unique bakery and not just a space in a market hall.”
As a result, he plans to close the bakery in The Source.
A new location will also allow Reunion to consistently make refrigerated pastries — like cakes, cream-based tarts and profiteroles (cream puffs) — alongside its loaves, croissants, buns and, of course, the eye-fluttering Portuguese egg custard tarts known as pastel de nata.
“That is something I have wanted to do for a long time,” said De Sousa, who was nominated for a James Beard award in 2023 in the Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker category. “The passionfruit meringue tart we make is so good. But we can’t have it much because it is a pastry cream and it needs to be refrigerated. It would just melt where we are now.”
There will be a few tables inside as well as some on a patio out front. Eventually, he plans to get a liquor license so “you can have a bottle of wine and some sourdough bread with butter or jam — or all of the things that you can normally do a bakery in Europe,” he said.
The street, in the Platt Park neighborhood, is home to the South Pearl Farmers Market, along with more than two dozen restaurants, bars, coffee shops and even another bakery.
De Sousa doesn’t see other bakeries as competition, though, because when he started in Reunion in 2019, there were few other artisan bakeries in Denver, which meant a smaller talent pool when it comes to hiring employees. In the past few years, though, the city has experienced a bakery revolution, with some of the new business owners having trained with De Sousa.
“You go to other cities and there are bakeries on every corner,” he said. “I think it is good for everyone.”
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