About Us Pictures
Sophie’s is locally owned and operated by Carole Binkowski. Our goal with Sophie’s is to create a kind, caring environment where our customers can relax, unwind, and briefly escape the pace and pressures of everyday life.
What we lack in fanciness we try to make up for in the quality of our food and service.
We make almost everything from scratch and are obsessed with avoiding the use of preservatives, shortenings, and shortcuts generally. Everything in our warm pastry case is baked fresh that day, starting at 4:00 in the morning. We spend extra money to buy great ingredients (including European butter and European chocolate) and hope our customers understand and appreciate our unwillingness to take short cuts.
We use the same approach with our coffee. We could save a considerable amount of money buying less expensive coffee – but it just wouldn’t be the same. Our customers tell us they love our coffee with many telling us they believe our coffee and espresso drinks are the best in Tampa. We have had a number of customers from outside the US tell us they believe our coffee is the best they have had in the States!!!
In terms of service, we do our best to have everyone who works in our bakery, including our family members, focus on delivering kind, caring, thoughtful service to our customers. We make no claims to being perfect (although we sure try) and if we make a mistake please let us know so we can fix it!
Our menu is relatively limited based on a belief that in order to do things well we need to limit our focus. As is the case with our service, if we happen to make a mistake with one of our products we would greatly appreciate if you would let us know so we can fix it immediately.
Our goal for the bakery is to create such a high quality service and product experience that we become a destination for the Tampa Bay region. At the same time, we are particularly focused on making positive contributions to the surrounding neighborhoods which sit right outside our doors.
In addition to just stopping in to relax on a whim, we hope you will utilize our neighborhood bakery for school meetings, bible studies, book clubs, bunco groups and other activities which play a role in enhancing and positively touching the lives of those who live in our surrounding neighborhoods, South Tampa, and destinations beyond.