In late March of 2024, Robert Smythe, owner of the local baked goods business Pastry Pants, announced that the operation would be moving from his home on Cornell Avenue to a brick and mortar bakery in downtown Swarthmore. A few months later, the new incarnation of Pastry Pants opened its doors to the Swarthmore community and resumed production of European-style breads and pastries. In the first week of October 2026, less than three years later, however, a sign appeared in the shop’s front window announcing its permanent closure.
Many former patrons expressed their appreciation for Pastry Pants’s contributions to the town’s economy and recounted fond memories of their encounters with the owner on social media in the days following the announcement. Local newspaper The Swarthmorean published an article about the bakery’s closing ahead of its final farewell sale on Oct. 3. Overall, the reaction from Swarthmore borough residents was one of nostalgia and dismay at the loss of a beloved local institution.
Swarthmore College community members, however, were generally less connected to Pastry Pants. Smythe reports that fewer students patronized than he had expected given the shop’s proximity to campus and the limited dining alternatives in Swarthmore’s downtown. In an interview with The Phoenix, he said that he believes many students never purchased from, or even visited, Pastry Pants while it was open.
A Complicated Customer Base
Smythe identified a number of potential factors for the limited engagement from the student body, including a lack of “adventurous students who decide to cross those scary train tracks and come into the ville,” as well as some logistical difficulties with being able to advertise directly to students and their parents.
Smythe said he baked a total of only three cakes for students during Pastry Pants’s entire time at the Park Avenue location.“I’m not saying that [receiving more special order requests] would have changed my mind,” he said, “but it would have been a lot different if I had had another source of income that I could … at least include in my calculations.”
Some students commented that they had visited Pastry Pants before but were not particularly impressed with the bakery’s offerings. According to Andy ’27 who wished to remain anonymous, the taste and quality of a cake was reportedly “disappointing” and not noticeably better than what could be found at a grocery store.
Smythe’s relationship with the college’s administration was similarly complicated. He worked as the lead baker in the Dining and Community Commons (DCC) for almost a year when the new building first opened in 2022. Smythe said that, at the time, he was expected to produce “twelve- to fourteen-hundred pieces of pastry a day from scratch” and was not given a contractually-obligated assistant to help him for the first few months.
He had hoped to expand the bakery offerings to better reflect the preferences and traditions of the student population, and for “the students and people who come to the dining hall to learn that there’s more than [French or] American stuff when it comes to pastrymaking.” His efforts, though, were repeatedly rebuffed, and eventually, he reached a breaking point.
After work conditions failed to improve — “I was incredibly overworked, and the job required me to come in at five in the morning when there was no reason to” — Smythe quit and decided to open a bakery in his backyard soon after.
Once this first iteration of Pastry Pants was up and running, he envisioned bringing his branded Piaggio Ape truck, an Italian delivery vehicle, to various locations on campus as a late-night food option for students. Ultimately, logistical complications prevented Smythe from implementing this plan, thus foreclosing an early opportunity for his business to engage with the college community.
Speaking more broadly on the relationship between Swarthmore College and local small businesses, Smythe noted, “I think it’s something for students to realize that there are a lot of people in town who want to do more with the college, and it’s difficult.”
Beyond the unique challenges of operating a small bakery in a college-adjacent town, Pastry Pants also faced the same hurdles that plague bread and pastry businesses across the greater Philadelphia area. Rittenhouse Square’s Metropolitan Bakery, which supplies bread to the Swarthmore Co-Op, marked another recent closure. Metropolitan Bakery will now produce wholesale baked goods exclusively, a service which was requested of Pastry Pants by cafes in the region at several points in Smythe’s baking career as well.
The problem for Smythe, however, is that scaling up to wholesale production often involves switching to an industrial process “where, basically, it’s loading stuff into a machine.” Smythe was unwilling to compromise on the shortcuts that industrial baking entails, and commented that “you can taste the shortening, you can taste the lack of care” in the goods that are produced by the wholesale bakeries.
Pastry Pants’s dependency on daily foot traffic also meant that production levels had to be adjusted according to the day of the week: Saturdays were high-volume days with lines frequently spilling out the door, “but then there was also Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, when often there were no people.”
Smythe found it difficult to predict the level of demand for those days of the week despite meticulous record keeping, and experienced occasions on which he would “have thirty-six loaves of bread on the shelf and would not sell one of them because no one came in.”
He suggested that the location of Swarthmore’s downtown might be less than ideal for increasing non-borough patronage because the heavy traffic on Chester Road runs parallel to the area rather than passing through it. Cars driving through Swarthmore “don’t know that we’re there, so every business has to be a destination,” says Smythe.
Smythe, Students Reflect
In spite of all the difficulties Smythe faced in running Pastry Pants, the experience has left him with many cherished memories. A throughline that stands out to him is the way that the bakery brought community members together in their moments of celebration.
As Smythe was applying to rent the space out to start the shop on Park Avenue, he spent a lot of time thinking about how bakery is about celebration. “Bakery is about family. Bakery is about celebrating things with your family.” Seeing patrons talk in line, friends and strangers alike, he believes that he did ultimately achieve his aspirations for Pastry Pants.
Among the group of students who did frequent Pastry Pants, many echoed the positive sentiments of customers from outside the college.
Sarah Ocampo ’25, who worked at the bakery while she was a student, recalls how every person in each department of the bakery had their own signature style. “You could kind of tell who made what in a personalized and special way.” Katherine Kihiczak ’25 also remembers the impact of Pastry Pants on her time at Swarthmore: “I have very fond memories of going there on Wednesday mornings with friends.”
Smythe, who wishes he had “gotten to know more students,” believes that the relationship between students and the town is dependent on continued engagement from both sides. In a small community like Swarthmore, “if you want to have a place where people know your name, you have to go in there and tell them your name.”
Pastry Pants was Smythe’s way of building the communal life he wanted for himself and his neighbors. Moving forward, he will be recreating the bakery experience with an upcoming cookbook of his most popular recipes.
