Schubert's Bakery

What happened after

Closed its doors in January 2020 after 50+ years, following the death of longtime owner Stephen Riccelli. The former space (49 N. Broad St., Nazareth) was taken over in July 2021 by a different, unrelated business, More Than Cakes Bakery & Pastries.

Closure date on record: 2020-01

What happened on the show

Schubert's Bakery gave Kerry Vincent one of the season's tougher owners to reach, a man who had walked away from a well-paying career to chase a baking dream and then let the reality of it grind him down. By the time cameras arrived in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, the long hours and sliding sales had drained his motivation and soured his mood, and a grumpy owner behind the counter is its own kind of business problem. Vincent's job across this short Food Network run was rarely just the recipes; it was the person who had stopped believing in the shop. Here that meant confronting an owner whose enthusiasm had curdled into resentment and trying to reconnect him with the ambition that put him behind the mixer in the first place. The episode, third of the nine, aired in early April 2014. It is a familiar shape for the series: genuine passion buried under exhaustion and numbers moving the wrong way, with only a few days to dig it back out.

After the cameras left

Schubert's did not make it to the present. The Nazareth bakery closed in January 2020 after more than fifty years, following the death of its longtime owner, Stephen Riccelli. The storefront at 49 North Broad Street did not stay empty for long: in July 2021 an unrelated business, More Than Cakes Bakery and Pastries, took over the space. That successor shares the address but not the lineage, so Schubert's itself should be read as closed, with the corner still selling baked goods under a new name and new owners. Two independent local news reports, one on the closing and one on the new tenant, line up on the sequence. A half-century institution outlasted Vincent's 2014 visit by years before time and loss finally closed it.