By Sarah Golibart Gorman
Foodie Q&A is a series showcasing the Harrisonburg food community. Food enthusiast and storyteller Sarah Golibart Gorman interviews food and drink makers behind the Friendly City food scene. You’ll read about their origins, creative processes, aspirations, and go-to spots in town. Fresh articles drop the second Tuesday of each month from June 2024 to June 2025.
This month Gorman sat down with Nicole Marie to hear about her family restaurant legacy, baker playlist, and how she graduated from Magpie dishwasher to head baker.
Gorman: Can you tell me where you grew up and about the food you grew up eating?
Marie: I grew up on Long Island. I’m a third-generation American from a predominantly Italian-American family. My dad’s mom was French, but we always joke that we forget about that because the Italian culture is very strong. When my great-grandparents came over, they settled in New York City—Manhattan, Hell’s Kitchen, and Queens—and they all found work in the restaurant business.
My great-grandfather was the maître d’ at the Drake Hotel, and he is the inventor of Steak Diane, which is a beautiful steak dish. Another great-grandfather was the maître d’ at the Stork Club, where Frank Sinatra would go. My great-grandfathers were the men in the beautiful suits who would greet you at the door. They had such a softness and genteel demeanor.
That lineage trickled down. And my grandparents owned a restaurant. My dad owned a restaurant. I grew up always in restaurants. Many food people grow up in families that cook and have a very rich cooking culture. That was not us. My parents both worked full time and my mom would make frozen vegetables and chicken thighs. But what we did do was at least every week, we would go out to restaurants, all over Long Island and in Manhattan. And for me, as a little girl, eight years old, getting a new dress to wear, entering into these spaces was really magical.
We sat in these beautiful rooms with dim lighting, white linen tablecloths, glasses, all these forks and knives, and the waiter would spread the cloth napkin on your lap. We sat at those tables for four to five hours. It would be 11 o’clock, and I’m there as an elementary school kid, drinking a cappuccino with my grandparents and my parents, and then I’d go home and cry because I couldn’t fall asleep.
A foundational taste core memory for me is osso bucco, braised veal shanks. It’s not as common these days because people don’t enjoy eating baby cows very much. What kid eats veal shank and sucks the marrow out of the bone after the meat is gone? Me apparently.
Gorman: When did you begin cooking and who taught you?
Marie: I was told by my parents that I was not allowed to work in restaurants. I got a job at the mall at Williams Sonoma because that was kitchen-adjacent. I wanted to go to culinary school, I wasn’t allowed to do that. I went to college and worked as a journalist for a number of years. Then I went back to school and got my master’s degree in teaching. But in grad school I worked at Newtown Baking in Staunton and I knew in my bones that this was the kind of work I needed to do.
Before I worked there, I used to go to the bakery once a week and get the seeded baguette. It had poppy seeds, anise seeds, and sesame seeds. I would bring it back to my desk and eat the entire thing. I’d rip off piece by piece. There’d be shards of crust on my shirt, seeds all over, seeds in my teeth—a hot mess.
One day I went in and asked if they were hiring. I had zero experience, but for some reason they hired me. It was there that I met the best teacher I’ve ever had, Bill Willett. He and his wife Shani owned Newtown. I had never seen, aside from my dad, anybody work so hard in my life. And I knew nothing. It was embarrassing how little I knew. One day Bill asked me to cook something and I didn’t even know how to cut an onion, I didn’t know how to season things. I didn’t know how to make dough. I’d never made muffins or cookies.
Never once did Bill lose his temper or get frustrated or angry. He used to be a high school teacher, so I think he has that patient teacher spirit. I worked my way up from the register to a prep shift where I would make brownies, cookies, glazes, muffin mix. Then I eventually started doing the butter blocks for the croissant dough and then running the sheeter a little and learning how to shape dough. I loved it. I knew that I wanted to keep doing it.
I was finishing grad school but wasn’t sure if I wanted to teach. My mom was dying from cancer at that time, and I was living at home helping to take care of her. I remember telling her that I wasn’t sure about teaching, and she looked at me and said, “You just finished a graduate program. You need to try teaching.” I felt like there wasn’t a way for me to disobey her last wish for me. And so I did it. I became a teacher. And that was a wonderful area of my life. I became a mother, which is the greatest thing I’ve ever become. Motherhood has made me reflect on what I want for my daughter and son. I want to show them that living a life where you’re passionate about what you do is possible.
Gorman: What led you to work at Magpie?
Marie: Mid-pandemic, I’d been cooped up with an 18-month-old and a three-year-old. I was going insane. And I got a part-time job at Magpie. The only open job was a dishwasher, and I was like, I don’t care. I’ll take it. I remember Chef Rachel Fitzgerald opening the kitchen door on my first day and walking in after being a stay-at-home mom for four years and thinking, “Oh my god. Yes.” I was like, “Give me the dishes. I’m going to clean them like you’ve never seen them clean before.”
I spent six months washing dishes every Saturday and loved it. But I began to look over at the bakery and think I want to be there. So I shifted my Saturdays to the bakery, which looking back was crazy that someone allowed me to run the Saturday bake on my own. It’s the biggest bake of the week. Last year, I took over as head baker, and I’ve been here full-time ever since.
Gorman: Can you share about your creative process as a baker?
Marie: The evolution of the bakery has been really amazing to watch. Rachel Herr was Magpie’s first baker, and she did a lot of the foundational work—our style of baking, the sorts of grains we use, the flavor profiles. Classics we’ve had since the beginning include our chocolate croissant, plain croissant, cardamom morning bun, and the vanilla braid, which is our top-selling pastry of all time.
We work together to introduce new things. For example, the almond croissant. We didn’t have an almond pastry for a really long time, and a bakery should have one of those. As a team, we did a few iterations to ensure it looked right and tasted right.
We try different seasonal pastries and flavors. We always have a lot of fun at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The Danish is something new that we started a few months ago, and it lends itself really well to seasonal fruits. Our savory croissants are also relatively new. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel; we want to do what we do well. We want to provide quality pastries that are unpretentious. Bread is the most wholesome and basic thing you can eat, so that’s important to us, too—not getting too out there, but staying in line with our community and what people want.
Gorman: What’s a day in the life of Nicole Marie the baker?
Marie: My alarm goes off somewhere between four and four thirty. I try to lay out my clothes the night before. I live very close to the bakery, so I get a beautiful walk in the morning where I try to center myself and look at the clouds, the moon, and Blacks Run. It requires a certain presence when you enter the bakery in the morning.
When I arrive, there’s no one else there. I turn on the dim lights at the front and the first thing I do is make sure the ovens are on. Then, I go to the fridge, get out the pastries we made the day before, load them in the proofer, and begin getting the bread loaded up in the oven.
We all love the bake shift because you get two to three hours before anyone else shows up. The city is asleep; you might see a random car, but it’s just you with your coffee and your music. I like to listen to jazz in the morning, or sometimes I have a wake-and-bake playlist of rap music that’s like 500 hours long.
I’m working quickly, but everything has to be done with intention. Every score that goes on the loaf requires focus. The bread is so much better when you really concentrate on every slash you’re making. The pastry requires constant attention too. All morning, your brain is timing things. There are different timers going off all around. You’re checking dough consistency and just hustling. Then you get a little respite, make a latte, and keep going.
This pace continues until the bake is done, and then you begin shaping sourdough, which is its own beast. You’re working at the bench table with all the loaves, and by that point, noon comes. Every baker hits the wall at noon where you don’t know what’s going on, and nobody should talk to you because you won’t make any sense. You’re physically and mentally exhausted, but you’re around a group of people who understand. We always change the music at noon—jazz in the morning, then something like Mac Miller to keep it going.
Half the week, I’m with my kids. So, after work, I pick them up, still filthy in my work clothes, and spend the afternoon and evenings with them. I try to turn in by nine o’clock to do it again the next day. I have a very small life, but I don’t mind it. My work is incredibly life-giving, and my children are incredibly life-giving, and I’m content with that. I don’t mind hard work. I learned that from my dad.
Gorman: In June, the bakery closed for renovations. Can you share about the expansion?
Marie: When Magpie first opened, we were doing about 12 loaves of sourdough a day and maybe 30 pastries. Now, on a Saturday, we bake between 30 to 50 loaves of bread and over 200 pastries. We’d been talking about expanding for about a year and a half because it became impossible to grow in that space.
My job over the past year was to streamline all of our processes and learn from other experts. I’m part of all these forums online and the Bread Bakers Guild. I did a lot of learning and implementing so that once the space was built, we would be ready to roll. We did construction in one week, which was insane. Chestnut Ridge Coffee Roasters moved out, and then renovations began.
Everyone on staff has expressed how amazing it is to be able to do the job we want to do in the way we want to do it. We can start doing baguettes, offering focaccia at lunchtime, different kinds of breads, more pastry—so we’re not selling out at 10 am. It was hard for us to work so hard and then not even be able to serve our customers until we closed. I’m really glad we don’t have to feel that anymore.
Gorman: What aspirations do you have for the future? What’s next for you in your food journey?
Marie: I have zero aspirations. There’s a Zen saying, “Present moment. Wonderful moment.” So if I died today, I’d be very happy with my life.
I feel like I’m exactly where I should be. My goal is just sustain this. I want to make people happy. I want to keep this bakery in good condition so that the community can enjoy it and have some of those magical experiences that I had when I was a little girl.
Gorman: What are some of your go-to spots in town to eat? To drink?
Marie: I really love the back deck at The Golden Pony. My kids and I love going there and getting some nachos and cauliflower wings. Another place we love that isn’t really on the restaurant scene is the co-op hot bar. It has been my salvation this year. I’ve been through a lot personally, and being able to get what tastes like a home-cooked meal has been really nourishing for my soul. Sometimes you don’t want to eat out at a restaurant, but that hot bar is fantastic. I’ll bring my kids and give them a box and say, “Make your own dinner, pick what you like.”
Gorman: Who would you love to bake for?
Marie: I’m gonna sound really hokey. But the children—all the children, all the kids from all over the city. Come on in.
I get incredible amounts of joy from seeing their eyes light up, as if what we’re doing is some kind of magic. I always try to give them a little treat, break off something and say, “Become a baker when you grow up.” When I think about who I bake for, there are a few people that come to mind that I’ll keep to myself, but the kids—they don’t get to see stuff like this very often. So, them.
And also, Erykah Badu. She’s just an incredible woman. Erykah, you come get yourself a vanilla braid.
To see what Nicole is baking at Magpie follow along on Instagram or visit her at the bakery, 85 W Gay St, Harrisonburg, VA.
Editor’s Note: This article was updated on 8/14 to correct a misspelling and a detail about a dish described above. It was updated on 9/18 to reflect a name change.
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