Jyan Isaac Horwitz had his paperwork all ready to move to Germany. After baking at popular Venice Beach spot Gjusta for a few years, the then-19-year-old eyed the border town of Freiburg im Breisgau to learn underneath one of his favorite bakers. He even went out there and interned for a few days to make sure it was the right fit—in February of 2020. You can guess what happened next.
Like the rest of the world, Horwitz turned to baking bread at home instead. But unlike most of us, he’d already been doing so since he was 13, when a visit to Tartine in San Francisco sparked his interest in sourdough starters. “I was very intrigued because it’s alive, you know? So I wanted to learn how to make one,” he says of his initial after-school starter experiments.
His naturally-fermented sourdough was a pandemic hit among friends and neighbors, and as Instagram orders started flooding in, Horwitz’s 100 loaf-output had quickly outgrown his family’s kitchen. Jyan Isaac Bread transitioned to a storefront that his dad owned in Santa Monica (it was sitting vacant due to the pandemic) in 2021, and the lines down the block almost immediately followed and persisted.
Now at 22, Horwitz has been learning how to manage the half-dozen full-time bakers who work for him, many of whom he knows from his days at Gjusta. He’s also busy readying his next step: a centralized production space in Culver City that’s five times the size of his current kitchen. Horwitz says he’ll be stepping up his wholesale business (“Basically, we have no choice but to just sell more bread.”) and dreams of opening small cafes all over L.A., ideally starting in Pacific Palisades.
