In the garden of a sunny yellow Victorian, blooms on lush Esperanza plants match the century-old dwelling that’s home to a neighborhood bakery — and the baker herself.
Edinburg transplants Becky Medellin and her husband Jack Salmon opened Scratch Kitchen in 2017 at the corner of West Russell Place and San Pedro Avenue.
They make everything from, well, scratch. The same could be said for their small cafe in the Alta Vista neighborhood.
Just blocks from their first home together, a unique property caught the couples’ eye while out on a walk, and now has their business and hearts, too.
“We weren’t sure how we wanted to do it,” Medellin said of the idea to move their bakery from their hometown to San Antonio. “We didn’t know if we wanted to find a spot to rent or purchase a building, and so it kind of just fell into our lap.”
But the house needed some renovation and reworking.
Adaptive reuse of historic structures for food and beverage is common around the world.
In San Antonio, Hixon Properties turned a former Cadillac auto dealership building into the Make Ready Market and Tia’s Taco Hut operates from an old filling station on North St. Mary’s Street.
Liberty Bar is located in an 1883 King William neighborhood mansion also once used as a Benedictine convent.
For Scratch, Medellin and Salmon renovated the space where a hair salon had operated previously, removing the sink stations and installing a bold floral wallpaper mural and an antique chandelier they discovered in a crawl space.
The vintage portrait of an unknown woman also found stashed away was reframed and hung on the wall and a discarded door transformed into a long table. They rebuilt and painted crumbling window rails.
Cupcakes, bread, rolls
For the first few years, Scratch Kitchen baked everything in a tight kitchen they built for the 800-square-foot eatery.
As demand grew, they then added a lunch service to their menu of Hummingbird cupcakes, frosted cinnamon rolls, raspberry danish, Nutella bread and their popular lemon pistachio bars.
“We just had crowds coming for lunch, and eventually started asking about catering,” she said.
Alta Vista resident and neighborhood association board member Elizabeth Allen visits Scratch often. “It’s perfect walking distance, and it’s such a sweet and incredibly individual place,” she said. And she appreciates the remodeled space.
“I think that thoughtful adaptive reuse of our older buildings really keeps the neighborhood vibrant and attractive for the people who’ve always lived here as well as the people who move in,” Allen said.
On a recent morning, mom-friends Tempie Mena and Jennifer Edmonds-Jones stopped in for a bite after dropping their children off for a horticulture micro-school lesson nearby. They both ordered breakfast sandwiches which are served all day.
“It’s so cute,” Mena said. “I told [Jennifer] I’m going to take lots of pictures of her in front of the wallpaper.”
The house-turned-restaurant is still a work in progress, Medellin said. “My husband told me to be patient, we’re gonna get there. We’ve been here 10 years, and it just takes so much time to do it correctly.”
The restaurant’s wholesale orders increased during the pandemic. In 2020, they began leasing a production kitchen on the East Side, then in 2024 opened their own at 612 E. Hackberry.
The kitchen supplies both the tiny cafe and dozens of other spots, including places like Press Coffee, King William Coffee House, Nowhere Bookshop and The Honeybean Coffee & Tea.
Scratch bakers also make 1,400 kolaches a week there, using sausage from Opa’s Smoked Meats of Fredericksburg.
The Scratch menu is made up of mostly recipes from Medellin’s parents, while some are her own and also that of her baking team, whom she praised.
“It’s important to me they find joy and meaning in their work, because for me it is really meaningful to be able to serve food to so many people, and to have people come together over food in our restaurants,” she said.
Expansion at their current address, which has some seating both inside and out, isn’t in the cards.
“We played with the idea of expanding the restaurant and doing another concept upstairs, but I think we’ve settled on the idea that we’d like to stay and live up there,” Medellin said. “This is the only house our kids have lived in, and it’s sentimental for us.
“We do love the neighborhood.”
The family enjoys the walkability of Alta Vista and being able to walk to the library, the children’s school, restaurants, parks and a swimming pool, she said.
“My 8-year-old, she always goes, ‘we have everything we need,’” Medellin said. Including a cafe just down the stairs, of course.
Medellin has no plans to add more locations of Scratch in other parts of town, except for a take-out service at the Hackberry location in the next year.
“We like having the unique setting, the old house,” she said.
