Brown Butter Bakeshop celebrates reopening in Door County

Rachel Kroeger

Staff

June 29, 2026

SISTER BAY – From a mountain-state food truck to a lakeshore storefront, Owner Tina Peters said her business, Brown Butter Bakeshop, has followed her to Door County, recently opening at 10592 Country Walk Drive.

“It is just me, and then my husband works part-time [helping] with the front of the house,” she said. “Sometimes, our 12-year-old son works [the] front of house as well.”

Though her family is originally from Stevens Point, Peters said they relocated to Colorado in the early 1990s – where she subsequently met her husband at their restaurant, Fort Collins Brewery & Tavern.

“I was the general manager and co-owner,” she said. “He was a customer, and I was working in the tasting room and managing that. He would come in and just kept coming in, and, finally, one of the girls in the tasting room [said], ‘I don’t think he’s coming in for the beer.’”

After getting married and having their two sons, Peters said she and her husband decided to step away from the restaurant, allowing her to pursue a sweeter side of service.

“We just got to the point [that] 85 hours a week was not sustainable, and… [it wasn’t] really the lifestyle I was looking for, so we sold the business,” she said. 

At that time, Peters said she decided to explore the culinary side of the restaurant industry after spending years focused on the business side.

“So, I went to culinary school and pastry school, and I really fell in love with [it],” she said.

In 2020, around the same time she went to school, Peters said her family began revisiting America’s Dairyland – vacationing in Door County.

“Even though we all lived in Colorado, [my parents] wanted to take our boys – the grandkids – for a first family trip, and that’s the place they picked,” she said. “I remember the first year they went, I’m like, ‘I’m good, I’ve [lived in] Wisconsin my whole teen years’ – [but] then they came back with all the photos and the stories, and I went, ‘Wait a minute, that’s Wisconsin?’”

Peters said she initially founded Brown Butter Bakeshop in 2023 as a food truck, offering a rotating menu of baked goods inspired by her family’s love of food.

“I grew up around food – we’re a very Polish family, and that’s how we were all raised,” she said. “You eat together, you drink together and you celebrate, and I found most of my really longstanding memories were around something sweet.”

Though the mobile business was doing well in Colorado, Peters said she announced in January the permanent relocation of  Brown Butter Bakeshop and her family to Sister Bay after spending more time in Door County during the off-season.

She said those visits helped shift their plans, citing the community atmosphere and connections they built locally.

Peters said the hunt for Brown Butter Bakeshop’s home came before her family’s.

“We started looking for a place for the bakery first,” she said. “Then we purchased our home and moved here in February.”

Despite recently opening the week of Mother’s Day, Peters said Brown Butter Bakeshop has already grown a following in Sister Bay.

“We’ve just been blown away [by] the amount of local people who have come, and that, to us, is incredibly important, because we live here,” she said. “This is our community year-round.”

Creating local connection

Though her husband, born and raised in Colorado, had to adjust to Wisconsin winters – “we did have to get a snowblower” – Peters said her family has embraced Sister Bay’s small-town feel. 

“[When] we moved to Colorado in the early ’90s, at that point, [Fort Collins] was a really small town – the college was the only thing there,” she said. “When we left, its [population was] 450,000 people, and it’s just grown to such a large-scale place. It just wasn’t the fit for us anymore.”

Though Brown Butter Bakeshop is not currently a year-round operation, Peters said she hopes business will grow enough to serve residents and tourists in every season.

“We try to ask everyone who comes in, ‘how did you hear about us?’ and, ‘where are you coming from?’” she said. “So, we have a good gauge of how much of [our business] is local [and] how much of it is tourist support.”

The addition of Mondays to her store schedule, Peters said, was intentional to offer a local reprieve for other service and hospitality professionals in Door County.

“People who work in the [service] industry, at hotels or at all the other restaurants…, they have a spot Monday [to] come and get their goodies, get a coffee [and] regather before we all do it again the next weekend,” she said.

Supporting her fellow service industry professionals, Peters said, was a primary motivation for opening Brown Butter Bakeshop in Sister Bay.

“Service in general is a very difficult industry, and if you don’t have a passion for it, it can burn you out really quickly,” she said. “So, I want to do as much as I can to support my community of service, but also myself.”

However, Peters said her passion for baking stems from her desire to create and enjoy connection.

“When I started baking more with my own boys, something as simple as chocolate-chip cookies, they would ask, ‘Can we do that together?’” she said. “[It] became more enjoyable and the creative aspect of it, I found, came easier to me.”

Stone-ground nutrition

While searching for property in Door County, Peters said a local friend, owner of the James Beard-nominated restaurant Cultured, told her about a gluten-free bakery in the Country Walk Shops.

“I’d never heard of them, and I didn’t know this whole lower level of garden shops existed,” she said. “So, we came down here, I chatted with [the owner], we had some delicious treats, then as we’re walking around the corner, there’s a [for lease] sign on the door.”

Peters said her new space on Country Walk Drive – a former kombucha brewing shop – offered existing infrastructure she could use.

“We met with [the owner]…, we signed a lease and it took us about 35 days to [renovate] and get our health department approval,” she said. “Then, I took two weeks [for] recipe testing, and we got going for Mother’s Day.”

The largest difference between her former and current offerings, Peters said, is the type of flour she’s using throughout all Brown Butter Bakeshop’s recipes.

“I was always using King Arthur [flour], which is an amazing, higher-end product,” she said. “[However, in Wisconsin], I met with Heartland Craft Grains, a family-owned farm in Lodi, and they grow all of their own wheat, oats, barley and grains – and they mill it themselves.”

The transition to using fresh, stone-ground flour from Heartland Craft Grains, Peters said, required some experimentation.

“[Compared] to a mass-produced flour, a stone-ground [flour] absorbs moisture totally differently, it bakes totally differently, it can change and vary within the batch, [etc.],” she said. “You have to be able to adjust.”

Regardless of its challenges, Peters said Heartland Craft’s flour offers more nutrition than that of a mass-produced flour – resulting in better product and support for local business.

“It’s coming stone ground, it’s not stripped [with] nutrients [put] back in,” she said, “and… it’s a family farm that’s a few hours away from us.”

Peters said Brown Butter Bakeshop’s staple brioche has seen the biggest change since the switch to Heartland Craft flour.

“You can see it in the brioche itself,” she said. “You can see the grains that are in there, the color of the brioche is slightly darker than it was previously and I just feel like the bun itself has so much more flavor rather than just [its] filling.”

No bad time for a warm cookie

Despite previously being “adamantly” against making custom cakes, Peters said that service is a new addition to Brown Butter Bakeshop following its Door County relocation.

“When I started, I didn’t want to make cakes, I wanted to make pastries,” she said. “Then, at some point, I feel like – as a business owner – you have to look at it and [ask], ‘This is what the market is telling me it needs, so is this something I’m willing to do?’”

After reluctantly accepting a handful of cake orders, Peters said she built her confidence and eventually established mainstay recipes.

“It’s become one of the favorite parts of my business,” she said. “I made a breast cancer survival cake last week…, and the woman was shaking and crying when she picked up the cake. The fact that I can be a tiny little part in someone’s life, I look back and [ask], ‘Why was I so adamant to not do this?’”

As the name indicates, Peters said brown butter is used across all her scratch-made recipes.

“I started really getting into brown butter heavily, and it’s something I just batch out,” she said. “I’m making huge batches of brown butter, and then it goes into pretty much everything we make.”

Open Thursday through Monday, Peters said Brown Butter Bakeshop offers a wide variety of baked goods – from cake slices, sweet and savory brioche buns to brownies, bars, cookies and more – for customers to purchase and enjoy on-site.

“I try to do about 10 items a weekend,” she said. “Those rotate through based on what I can get up here seasonally, what’s growing, what’s coming from the local farmers or things I just really like.”

Peters said a menu mainstay, however, is Brown Butter Bakeshop’s chocolate-chunk cookie.

“And we serve them warm,” she said. “I just feel like a warm chocolate-chip cookie [is] great when you’re having a [bad] day – it’s great when you’re celebrating – there’s really no time I feel like you can’t have a warm cookie.”

For more, visit brownbutterbakeshop.com.