A table set for anyone
who walks through the door.
Every dish on our menu started the same way every good Turkish meal does — made from scratch, for people we cared about, in a kitchen too small for what it would become.
It started when a family friend opened a Turkish grocery store and asked if we could bake a few things to help drive traffic. We said yes, and started making Simit — Turkish sesame bagels — and Borek, a savory pastry with different fillings, from our own kitchen at home. About 10 Simit and 12 Borek. They sold out almost immediately.
Word spread the way it does in a close community. A regular customer asked if he could bring three families in for breakfast. Another asked for tea with his Simit — a small tradition of hospitality that turned into cheese, jam, and breakfast items on the side, and eventually into his wife joining him the next morning for fresh Borek out of the oven. Weekends meant waitlists in a space that was never meant to hold them.
Orders kept growing until a home oven simply couldn't keep up — one of us baking through the night, sleeping through the day. We took over a commercial bakery to keep production going, and went from a few pastries a day to standing weekly orders.
Then COVID hit, and dine-in disappeared overnight. Our wholesale operation made just enough to survive while we carried the costs of construction, permitting, and rent on a new location — with no guarantee it would work. We weren't going to let it be part of our story to give up, so we didn't. With help from friends and family, we opened our doors toward the end of 2020, unsure if nine months of closure meant our customers had moved on.
We weren't just remembered — we were overwhelmed, and had to close early on our first day back. We hired more staff and kept going. Today My Cravingz serves our signature Serpme breakfast spread and a full Turkish menu to guests from all over, and has been featured by outlets including Forbes and The Washington Post. The bakery is still family-run — the same values, just a bigger table.
Every sauce, jam, and pastry is still made the way it was in that first home kitchen — nothing shortcut, nothing outsourced.
Offering tea to a guest isn't a menu item here — it's a tradition. You're a guest in our home before you're a customer.
From our family in the kitchen to Salih running the floor — this is still the same family that baked the first batch of Simit.
Our Serpme spread is still the same recipe from those first mornings — just made for a few more people now.