By Amber Wilson | Photography by Randy Krause Schmidt
How a 21st-birthday cheesecake in a rehab facility, a six-day king cake hustle, and one stubborn refusal to cook for anybody else turned Martha Gilreath into the pastry chef behind New Orleans’ beloved Nolita Bakery.
The first thing Martha Gilreath remembers baking in sobriety was a cheesecake. It was 2019; she was in treatment at a recovery center in Charleston, South Carolina, when a fellow resident turning 21 wanted a birthday cake. “I can figure that out,” she said. She figured it out. The next year, with the world shutting down around her, she decided to go back home to Louisiana and enroll at NOCHI—the New Orleans Culinary and Hospitality Institute. By the time she landed in New Orleans, eight months sober and in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was starting over in more ways than one. “I never wanted to do pastry, and I never liked baking,” she says, and you believe her because she had spent her whole life on the other side of the kitchen—hostess at 16 and then bartender, server, fry cook, garde manger, and finally executive chef. She wanted to improvise. Which, she’ll be the first to laugh about, is basically forbidden in pastry.
So, it’s a funny thing that pastry is what saved her—and stranger still that the part of it she couldn’t stand is the exact part that did the saving. The thing Martha needed most to rebuild her life—structure, repetition, rules—is exactly what pastry demands. “It’s a lot of the disciplines that being sober requires of me,” she says, “the discipline and the willingness and the learning.” The improviser who hated being told what to do found, in the most rule-bound corner of the kitchen, daily proof that following the steps would be rewarded. Her years in the kitchen gave her the one gift a baker needs most: a feel for “which rules I can break . . . and which ones I absolutely can’t.” It shows most in the croissants.
“I love, love, love, love to make croissants,” she says. “It’s meditative. . . . There’s so much structure in the process that it’s extremely rewarding.”
The king cakes came almost by accident—her mentor, Zach Miller, now teaching at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, floated an off and idea, and six days before Carnival 2021, Martha asked a friend if she wanted to make a few with her and sell them. They sold 250 in less than a week, proving there was an appetite for her pastry.
“Don’t tell God your plans,” she says with a laugh, “because I always said I’ll never own a bakery, and I’ll never do custom cakes ever.” But while she was sitting with her boyfriend after walking away from an executive chef job, he asked if she wanted to go cook for somebody else. “I had wasted 16 years of my life,” she says, “not adding anything to the world, and I don’t want to miss another minute of my life. . . . I don’t want to cook for anybody else.” He said, “OK, let’s do it.” Six months later, in 2024, the doors to Nolita Bakery opened in Mid-City, a few blocks off Bayou St. John.
The pastry case at Nolita is unapologetically Louisiana, run by a pastry chef who’ll tell you she’s “more of a savory girl, even though I own a bakery.” Her favorite is the boudin Danish—pork and rice and Cajun spice tucked into laminated dough. Come spring, behind the king cakes, it’s the crawfish bread that empties the case fastest. There’s a pecan pie-stuffed croissant. Louisiana wedding cake flavors like café au lait, satsuma, an old-fashioned–inspired cake with a rye-whiskey crumb. Among her favorites is a bourbon pecan cake cut with pecan flour and finished with caramel pecan buttercream, which she calls “super, super Southern but also kind of modern.” Get the recipe.
Ask Martha what Nolita means to her and she won’t name a single pastry. Instead, she’ll tell you about a couple who started coming in while the wife was pregnant, who stopped by on the way to the hospital to have the baby, and who, on that little girl’s 1st birthday, came to Nolita first. “Holy crap,” she remembers thinking, “this is the thing.” That’s exactly what she wants Nolita to become: the kind of place that becomes part of a family’s memories. “Whenever I go to City Park, it makes me think of my parents,” she says. “I hope the bakery is that for those kids.”
She shares a favorite line from Steel Magnolias:
“I would rather have 30 minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.”
Now, she gets to have it by the dozen—in king cakes boxed before sunrise, in crawfish bread still warm from the oven, in wedding cakes made for the days people remember for the rest of their lives. The name, Nolita, chosen on a whim long before any of this existed, turned out to know something before she did. “For me, it just means happy,” she says. “The universe has been kind.”
