GetRight’s finally opening bakery in Wheat Ridge in May

Lindsey Judd is happy to have her home back. Not long after she and husband Matt Dulin bought their first Denver residence in 2020, Dulin gutted it and turned it into GetRight’s, an at-home bakery operation — known as a cottage bakery — and a plant shop.

Now, three years later, the pair are opening their first brick-and-mortar space, located at 6985 W. 38th Ave. in Wheat Ridge, on Friday, May 19. And they can finally call their house a home.

“I’m ready to check this one off our list,” Dulin said.

For Dulin, an Arizona native who grew up in Thornton, the pandemic came at a perfect time. He’d been working in the restaurant industry for 19 years, with his last stint at Uncle Ramen in Washington Park. But the high-pace environment was slowly crippling his passion for the business.

“You get to a certain point where you’re just managing, and you’re kind of removed from the process, and you start to lose the fun of it,” Dulin said. “I was trying to figure out how to start a family and how to have an actual life, and it’s just really hard to find that balance in restaurants.”

In Feb. 2020, he left Uncle and started his own greenhouse business out of the home he shares with Judd, selling cactuses and other succulents. Dulin’s love of plants started at a young age when he’d water his mother’s plants as chores, and it continued into his 20s when he worked on farms around the country.

“The more that I learned about plants, the more that it brought me closer to cooking,” Dulin said. “And the more that I learned about cooking, the more I wanted to know about how food grows.”

But the plant business wasn’t taking off, partially because he had no following to help boost sales, so he returned to what he knows best: the kitchen. Dulin learned how to bake sourdough bread eight years ago while working with Alex Figura, co-owner of Dio Mio and Redeemer Pizza, at the since-closed Lower 48. And he’d tinkered with his recipe at home and by baking bread for his friends and family. So once he felt like he had the perfect loaf, he started selling it online and on social media during the pandemic. In the first few weeks, he was selling around 80 loaves of bread weekly, making deliveries across town and offering pick-up orders from home.

“The bread was the thing that helped spike our plant traffic,” Dulini said.

Dulin then added pastries, like plum galettes, coffee cake and biscuits, to the lineup, and over the next couple of years, he started selling his baked goods and plants at various spots around town, including pop-ups and farmers markets. The ultimate goal was to open a real store.

At first, Dulin and Judd considered mountain towns like Buena Vista, but they realized they had already built a strong foundation in Denver so they decided to stay and secured the 1,200-square-foot space last year. Since then, there have been several permitting delays, however.

Dulin has renovated the former nail salon mostly by himself, building out the kitchen and prep areas. He’s hired three employees to help him with baking, and Judd, who previously worked for Guild Education, will be the front-of-the-house manager.

GetRight’s, which will be open Thursday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to around 1 p.m., will serve sourdough bread and pastries, like their popular canelés, salted maple cinnamon rolls, babka, as well as cheesecakes and key lime pies, in the mornings. Dulin also wants to add more savory items like breakfast sandwiches or burritos. They won’t be serving coffee because they are located next door to the coffee shop Stylus and Crate. For lunch, Dulin wants to set it up like a European cafe with a variety of sandwiches made from the bread and ingredients they’re focusing on that week laid out in the pastry case, as well as prepared salads.

“I don’t want to be just another bakery doing a good croissant,” Dulin said. “There are so many good quality spots throughout Denver already doing that.”

GetRight’s is named after a comic book character named Goody GetRight that Dulin created back in the day. It’s also the pen name he used to write his book: Tour De Compassion: A Long Way to No Where, a story about a young man’s cross-country journey on a bike.

Plants for sale are hung all around the shop. “I’d rather have something that people are able to take care of better rather than a tropical plant, where your house needs to be set at like 70 degrees all the time,” Dulin said. “You need a humidifier or one of these spray bottles and need to mist it twice a day.”

This summer, Dulin plans to start a ticketed dinner series on the building’s rooftop to showcase more of his cooking skills outside of baking. He hosted the series in his and Judd’s backyard last year, selling out tickets in under 30 seconds for each event. The property has Airbnb spaces up top, so Dulin hopes to host some out-of-state chefs when he can.

He also wants to start a farmers market in the parking lot in partnership with Stylus and Crate and Colorado Plus Brew Pub and Tap House next door.

“There isn’t much in Wheat Ridge,” Dulin said. “It’s close enough to Denver to have city amenities, but it’s far enough removed to feel like you’re not in Denver. The more and more that we look around here, the more and more that we see young people with families that want to get out of the city, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to just only eat at Chipotle and Tokyo Joe’s or drive to Denver to get a good bite of food all the time.

“If we can focus on quality overall, then hopefully it makes everyone else either demand more quality or strive for more in some of the spots around here,” he said.

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