After building a devoted following for her bakery named “Cake,” on daily cupcake creations, mini-quiches and custom baked and decorated cakes, Shannon Ward has recently expanded it into a restaurant, Cake Bistro & Bakery.

For Cake’s first five and a half years in downtown Statesboro, Ward shared 58-C East Main St. with Cool Beanz Espresso Bar, whose owner David Hoyle sublet a front corner of her shop. As previously reported, Hoyle recently relocated Cool Beanz to 19 East Vine St., where he intends to make a large coffee roasting machine part of the décor. His move, in turn, allowed Ward fuller use of the available space on East Main.

“I knew that we had to step up our game if we were going to have the whole place to ourselves,” she said in an interview two weeks ago.

Now Cake Bistro & Bakery has tables and seats for 24 customers inside and chairs for 12 more patrons out front at sidewalk tables. Meanwhile, Ward hired a chef and a marketing specialist, eased into the “bistro” identity in August, and offered grand-reopening promotions last week.

“We’ve just kind of expanded and we do more food items now so we’re more of a restaurant,” Ward said. “We still do a lot of bakery stuff. I still do custom cakes and we still have cupcakes available every day.”

As regular customers know, she had started offering some lunch items a while back, about two years ago, in fact. But the recent move takes the non-bakery food items to a new level.

Kat Counts started as Cake’s chef in August and is now the bistro’s one full-time employee other than the owner.  Five other employees, most of whom are students, work there part-time.

Also in August, Ward’s sister-in-law Kari Stewart, who recently graduated from Georgia Southern with a marketing degree, joined the Cake team to market the business and its refreshed identity.

Expanded menu

The new lunch menu includes cold sandwiches, including pimento cheese sandwich, a turkey club, and a couple of chicken salad options; plus hot sandwiches such as a Cuban panini and a classic BLT, as well as wraps. The new Monte Cristo Wafflewich has ham and cheese and raspberry jam on a Belgian waffle.

But the everyday menu also lists six vegetarian entrees, some of which are vegan, plus the vegan broccoli slaw.

 “I try to make sure I have my vegetarians and vegans covered,” Ward said. “My daughter was vegetarian for a long time. Going to different restaurants in town, you realize there’s very little for people that don’t eat meat, so I have Beyond Burger and Beyond Bratwurst, which is plant-based protein. They’re both vegan.”

Another vegetarian item is the black bean burger, and some other sandwiches on the menu can be made vegetarian or vegan.

“So we do a lot of that, but then we also have real meat,” Ward said. “We carve our own ham, we carve our own turkey, and we don’t use processed lunch meat. We bake hams and turkeys in here and carve them up.”

“Kat is awesome.  She does all of that every week,” said Stewart, the marketing specialist, complimenting the chef.

Pretty much everything except the pre-packaged chips and soft drinks is made in-house.

“We make all of our salads and sides,” Ward said. “All of our cupcakes are homemade. I don’t use Crisco, I use real butter. I think that’s kind of what sets us apart from the rest. We use the best quality stuff we can get.”

The breakfast menu now includes ham, egg and cheese and bacon, egg and cheese paninis, a wrap, a brioche sandwich, the wafflewich and waffles, as well as quiche.

All-week specials

Besides the regular menu, Cake now has weekly breakfast and lunch specials, which remain the same Monday through Friday. This week the breakfast special is Strawberry Fields Forever French Toast, with cream cheese filling and fresh strawberries. The current lunch special is The Abbey Road, a sandwich with honey grilled chicken, caramelized onions, mozzarella and a pickled beet garnish.

“They last through the week so that everybody can have a chance to try whatever we’ve got, because we were doing daily specials, but people would come in and say, ‘Oh, I missed it.’” Ward said.

Cake Bistro & Bakery has also launched a loyalty punch-card program and a Georgia Southern student discount and now has “Cupcake Happy Hour” with half-price cupcakes 3-6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 1-3 p.m. Saturday.

The bistro is also hosting two cooking classes, one for adults and one for children, each month. Azure Rountree, cookbook author and regular contributor to the Statesboro Herald’s Moments magazine, leads these classes. She held her first Cake Bistro-based class for adults was last week, and a children’s class will be held Sunday, Oct. 6, from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. 

And Cake now has its own basic coffee, but Ward said she sends people who want “fancy” coffee drinks around to Hoyle’s new location. 

Herald reporter Al Hackle may be reached at (912) 489-9458.