Hello!

Our names are Derek and Samantha. We met in 2017 while working together at the restaurant Herb & Wood. Derek was the sous-chef and Sam the lead baker. We connected from the moment we met & have been partners in and outside the kitchen ever since. We having been running Relic Bageri for the past 3 years. It started in Samantha’s North Park apartment during the pandemic and has since blossomed into the bakery she always dreamed of!

About the Chefs:

Throughout childhood Samantha always found herself in the kitchen helping out; standing on a stool to wash dishes, frying tortillas with her papa Ross, and kneading homemade dough for cinnamon rolls with Grandpa Bird.

She remembers being obsessed with the bread machine mom would use; sitting on the counter, watching the loaf rise & bake, with the smell of yeast and bread in the air. In high school, she started working at a local private college for a large scale catering company & quickly fell in love with the hustle & bustle of the kitchen.

After graduating, she moved to San Diego & started working in restaurants while taking classes in Sustainable Agriculture at San Diego City College. Not being able to afford culinary school, multiple chefs encouraged her to find jobs that would teach on the job. She’s taken that to heart ever since.

When she was 22, she went to Copenhagen, Denmark to work at the bakery-Meyers Bageri in the mornings and staged at Matt Orlando’s restaurant Amass in the evenings. Then at 26, she moved to Prague and worked at Boulangerie Bio PAINS ET MERVEILLES in Augerolles, France where she learned how to work with food fired breads.

She’s worked in countless restaurants in San Diego including: under chef Anthony Wells at Juniper and Ivy, where she developed their bread program, and under Adrian Mendoza at Herb & Wood, where she worked at the lead baker. She traveled to Las Vegas multiple times to train under chefs Cedric Grolet, Bedros Kabranian, & Roy Shvartzapel. “What I love most about this industry & being a baker in particular is that it’s an endless road of knowledge, you can learn from anyone and everyone & you’ll learn something new every day.”

Derek fell in love with cooking right out of high school and attended Kirkwood Culinary College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Since then, he has worked in countless restaurants & under chefs like Matt Carter in Phoenix, Brian Malarkey, and William Bradley at Addison. Derek’s style is playful, and he likes to use classic French technique while putting his own midwestern spin on it.