We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Samantha Allen a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Samantha, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

The bakery that I own and operate, Wentworth & Fenn is a local bakery here in Charlotte, NC. We aren’t a huge operation. But, honestly, I prefer it that way. The mission that I strive very hard to keep and always obtain is: Quality over Quantity. We make small, seasonal pastries, bread, and custom cakes. Everything from scratch, everything with intention. We often refer to ourselves as tiny but mighty! It means a lot to me to serve pastries that are made with quality ingredients and again, only from scratch.i feel.it sets us apart.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

I’ve been baking in the industry since I was fifteen. It’s always been something I wanted to pursue as a career, I just didn’t know what kind of Pastry Chef I wanted to be or where I wanted to go within the industry.

Formally the executive pastry chef for The Fig Tree Restaurant, I opened Wentworth & Fenn, a unique bakery that creates wedding cakes, special event cakes, breads, and custom pastries that are sold out of the bakery at Camp North End. Plus, my original storefront,
a 1961 Shasta Camper, named Selma.

I was named ‘Best Pastry Chef’ in Charlotte, NC for 2017, traveled to New York to cook at the legendary James Beard House, and was nominated for ‘Best Pastry Chef of the East Coast Region’-James Beard Award in 2016. What a wild time..

Since the Fig Tree days though, the 1961 Shasta (named Selma) was custom built to be the bakeries original storefront.

Traveling to markets, breweries, and special events; Selma provided a way to get pastries to all W&F patrons.

While I still operate the camper for special events and markets, I now have the brick and mortar at Camp North End.

Open Wednesday – Sunday, you can come and enjoy all the seasonal pastries and breads!

Have you ever had to pivot?

As we all did im sure…

…covid happened…

When covid became apparent that it was going to rear its ugly head…we had to.shift our entire business model. There was no storefront. No bakery, essentially. I wasn’t sure how we were going to make it through the pandemic, but we had to do something, right? We ended up doing weekly, themed Pastry Variety boxes. Everyone in Charlotte was so considerate and wanted to support local. Thank goodness for that, otherwise we wouldn’t have made it out of the pandemic.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

For a lot of businesses, they are able to hire someone who can handle all of their Public Relation needs. As a small company, we just can’t afford that kind of service.

Even though we can’t afford one now, we have found ways to exist in social media mentions and grow our platform.

We reach out monthly to Charlotte influences, etc. It’s cheaper to partner with them and we still get a lot of public visibility that way.

Plus, it helps us grow our own platforms while staying in the public eye!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wentworthandfenn.com
• Instagram: wentworth_and_fenn
• Facebook: Wentworth and Fenn

Image Credits
Peter Taylor Photography Shrimp & Grisettes