Will a longtime Fayetteville bakery live on when second-generation owner hangs up his apron?

On a typical Saturday morning in Fayetteville, a line of customers stretches from the counter of Superior Bakery and into the parking lot of the Hope Mills Road pastry shop.

People chat as they wait their turn inside the unassuming bakery, trading testimony of their favorite treats, like the crumble-topped coffee cakes that line the tables of the sales floor each day; the golden pineapple upside-down cakes, sticky with a rich caramel glaze; the fudgy chocolate cake donuts, still hot from the fryer.

The smiling owner, Nick Poulos, hands each customer a complimentary fried croissant — the shop's calling card.

It was 67 years ago — nine years before Poulos was even born — when his father, John Poulos, first opened Superior Bakery. He came from Greece to America five years earlier, at age 20, to join his two brothers in Fayetteville.

He didn't have baking experience, other than a stint as a dishwasher at a patisserie in Athens, Greece, but when he learned of a bankrupt bakery on Raeford Road in 1956, "he knew he'd found his perfect business venture," the family recounted in the patriarch's 2019 obituary. At the time, Poulos was already at the helm of two city restaurants he'd later sell to focus on the bakery.

Under the elder Poulos' ownership, Superior Bakery sold wholesale baked goods to restaurants in the city. All of the baking was done by hand, producing two or three trucks of pies and bread every day of the week.

“He was a hustler,” Nick Poulos said of his late father, who died at the age of 89, leaving behind his wife of 61 years, Kay; their three children; six grandchildren; and more than a couple of pages in the annals of Fayetteville's food history.

Greek restauranteurs rule the Fayetteville food scene

The entrepreneurial spirit that filled John Poulos, filled his brothers, too. They each owned and operated restaurants that would go on to become some of the longest-running in Fayetteville. Gus Poulos opened New York Restaurant in 1957 and Chris Poulos opened Chris's Steak & Seafood House in 1963.

Both are still in operation today, but neither is still in the Poulos family. In the late '80s, Chris Poulos sold his share to Greg Kalevas, his longtime business partner. Nikolaus and Selena Drakos purchased New York Restaurant from Gus Poulos and his wife around the same time.

The Poulos brothers were among a few Greek families that were Fayetteville food pioneers, opening iconic restaurants that shaped the area's food scene for decades. Many of them — like Luigi’s, Zorba’s, Lindy’s and Pizza Palace — are still in operation.

Before buying his restaurants and then the bakery, John Poulos learned the ropes from the Kanos family, who operated Rainbow Restaurant, which still serves diner favorites from its longtime spot on Ramsey Street.

Those restauranteurs were role models for Nick Poulos and his peers, he said.

“We had all these influences of all these guys that were hardworking, put family first and were consistent as heck," he said. "Everybody had a restaurant and was that kind of a guy."

Superior Bakery comes to be a Fayetteville icon

Poulos was 6 years old when Superior Bakery moved to its current location on Hope Mills Road, a now-bustling thoroughfare that at the time was a sparsely inhabited lane surrounded by trees.

Over the next two decades, Poulos said, he spent time working at the bakery. Whenever he was home on break from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he would put on an apron and get to work.

When he graduated with a degree in business in 1987, Poulos worked at the bakery alongside his brother Stephen and his father, while he figured out his next move.

About three years later, his dad was ready to retire. Soon after, his brother was looking to move on, too. Nick Poulos said he was willing to take over, even if he wasn’t entirely prepared to.

“I’m the baby of the family, then all of a sudden it was all mine,” he said.

For his first decade in charge, Poulos said, he was still under the watchful eye of his father, who had difficulty relinquishing control.

Come the early 2000s, however, many of the mom-and-pop restaurants serviced by Superior Bakery closed. In their absence came chain restaurants and hotels with their own supply chains that didn’t include the need for local baked goods, he said.

The business model his father created, which had worked for so long, could no longer survive. Nick Poulos pivoted the business to a retail bakery, quickly finding a loyal legion of customers and nearly quadrupling monthly sales.

Yet, with the newfound success under the younger Poulos' vision, he never truly knew how his father felt about what he'd accomplished.

“Nobody told me, ‘I’m proud of you,’” Poulos said, his words tinged with sadness.

Along with the change to a retail bakery eventually came the iconic red logo with blue lettering that has come to be synonymous with Superior Bakery in the Fayetteville area, designed by his wife Kathie.

Red and blue, Poulos said, convey his patriotic spirit and the baker clutching bread, cake and buns is borrowed from the business cards his father used in the 1980s.

End of Superior Bakery may mean the end of an era

After more than thirty years as the owner, Nick Poulos said he’s still excited to come to work every day, and he doesn’t plan to retire anytime soon.

“I’m 58 going on 17,” he said. “I don’t plan on slowing down.”

Despite his own two children growing up in the bakery like he did, they never caught the bug, he said. His son John Poulos, 27, a computer science expert who works for Amazon Web Services, and daughter Lily Poulos, 22, who holds a degree in public health — show no interest in taking it over.

Poulos says he wouldn’t necessarily want anyone else to take charge. The shop could lose the magic that makes it a Fayetteville landmark.

“It takes a lot to get that special feeling when you walk in the door,” he said.

When Nick Poulos hangs up his apron, his family's legacy of operating food establishments in the city may come to an end.

“All the old guys — Uncle Chris, my dad, Uncle Gus — all of them are gone,” he said. “Who are the guys now?”

Food, dining and business reporter Taylor Shook can be reached at tshook@gannett.com, on Twitter, or Facebook. Want weekly food news delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the Fayetteville Foodies newsletter. 

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Superior Bakery has served Fayetteville for decades. What happens next?