Chef & the Baker, the South Tampa bakery and cafe run by chefs Rosana Rivera and Ricardo Castro, will open a second location in Tampa's West River district under the first licensing agreement in the brand's history.
The new bakery is planned for 1103 W. Main St., a roughly 2,200-square-foot space that Flour Street Group, a New York company led by chief executive David Candelaria, will develop and operate under license. The company describes it as the largest footprint the brand has taken, combining expanded production with retail under one roof.
The arrangement is a departure from how most local bakeries grow. Rather than raising money to build and staff each new store itself, Chef & the Baker is licensing its name, recipes and operating standards to an outside partner that supplies the capital and runs the day-to-day business. Candelaria has said his group reviewed a number of concepts before committing to this one, citing both its following and its operating discipline.
The chefs behind it
Rivera and Castro opened the South Tampa shop at 3413 S. Manhattan Ave., where it serves breads, pastries and empanadas from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. The pair are also the chefs behind the Tampa restaurants Piquant and Xilo Mexican.
Rivera is the better known of the two nationally. She won on Food Network's Beat Bobby Flay with her empanadas, a result that local coverage has attached to the bakery's name ever since it reopened in South Tampa in 2024 after hurricane damage. Castro has appeared on Disney+'s Foodtastic.
The South Tampa storefront is not the whole operation. The company also runs a wholesale kitchen in Pinellas Park at 4521 107th Circle N., which opens to the public as a pop-up on Saturdays and Sundays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and supplies wholesale accounts the rest of the week, including several inside Tampa International Airport. West River will be the brand's second full retail location, and the first it does not operate itself.
A platform, not a franchise
The licensing deal runs through RC Hospitality Group, the operating company that owns the Chef & the Baker brand. Rivera serves as its partner and creative director. It was founded by Maria Rivera, who previously served as president of Krispy Kreme's U.S. business, where revenue grew from roughly $300 million to roughly $1 billion, and later led the growth-stage chains Starbird and Smalls Sliders.
RC Hospitality's stated model is to scale founder-led restaurant brands through licensed operating partners instead of company-owned expansion. The parent supplies brand standards, systems and recipes; vetted partners bring the money and the local operators. Maria Rivera has framed the agreement as a governance question rather than a real estate one, arguing that the point was to prove a craft-driven brand can grow without losing what made it work, and has described West River as the first of a planned series. The company says additional licensed units are already under discussion.
