After four years, Brewster hot spot Eat Cake 4 Breakfast has a new home, and owner/chef Danielle Nettleton shows no sign of slowing down

Julia Child said, “To be a good cook you have to have a love of the good, a love of hard work, and a love of creating.” Eat Cake 4 Breakfast owner and pastry chef Danielle Nettleton embodies all three. 10 years ago, Nettleton wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, and now, a decade later, the must visit Eat Cake 4 Breakfast is coming up on its fifth year of business, thanks to Nettleton’s gourmet yet approachable delights and the dedicated support of the community around her. 

Stuck in a job she didn’t like and feeling lost, Nettleton took some time to figure out what it was that called to her. “I’d always loved baking at home, and I happened to find a nighttime baking job that I ended up loving. It came to me really naturally and I excelled at it,” she explains. Like famed home chef Julia Child, Nettleton took to Paris to learn the art of cooking, and after spending a year at Le Cordon Bleu, Nettleton came home with a degree in pastry. She returned to the Cape and worked for some local bakeries but found herself gravitating towards more leadership roles. “When you get into this career, you’re either someone who follows or you’re a leader, and I was always falling into the latter,” she explains. “Both of my parents are self-employed, so I grew up in that environment and watched them be in control of their careers. I definitely have that personality of taking charge. I’ve had chefs in the past tell me that I should probably do my own thing because I have a vision and I go with it.”  So when the opportunity came in 2015 to open up her own bakery, she took it. “I really hit the ground running. We’ve been very lucky as far as customer support. We really found a spot that was needed in town, and we got the support of the towns around us.”

After a few years in their leased building on Underpass Road in Brewster, Nettleton started looking for a new place to call home in the fall of 2018 and found a building just a mile away, visible from scenic 6A. “This building was on the market for maybe 24 hours,” she laughs, and by the beginning of 2019, the building was hers and the work began. With a little help from her father, a contractor, Nettleton transformed the former two-story office space into a chic, colorful Parisian getaway and the carpenter shop in the back into an open, airy kitchen. And now, in 2020, the public can appreciate the fruits of Nettleton’s labor. “We just had our opening day, and it was non-stop,” says Nettleton, “It was March on the Cape and we had a line basically all day, the tables were full, and we pretty much sold out. We definitely felt the love.” The larger space allows Nettleton to create and serve more products, but it also gives customers more space to sit and enjoy, to sip their coffee and chat. “I have windows into the kitchen here, so not only do people see what we’re doing and what goes into it, but the biggest payoff for me is that I get to see customers enjoying the product. On opening day, I was blown away by how much people love the pastries.”

Eat Cake 4 Breakfast has been providing the lower Cape with a spot to gather with friends and enjoy French patisserie quality goods without breaking the bank or feeling stuffy. “We do French pastry, that’s how I’m trained, but we try to put a fun little American twist on things. We do a Nutella nautilus—it’s a Danish with croissant dough and Nutella and heath bar crunch, so that’s not something that would traditionally be in a patisserie,” says Nettleton, “I think it’s fancy high-end products, but it’s fun and approachable. There’s nothing better than a little kid coming in and saying, ‘I want the passionata’ and they’ve never even seen a passion fruit. It’s a fun, happy place, but at the same time, we’re providing high end cuisine.” Like Child, Nettleton places importance on the approachability of French food, a cuisine sometimes known to be stuffy and inaccessible. Mugs available in the bakery sum it up perfectly, with another simple yet true quote from Child, “People who love to eat are always the best people.”

Make sure to visit Nettleton and Eat Cake online at eatcake4breakfast.com and in person at 26 Wampum Drive, Brewster