How Chef Michael Hackman Turned a Neighborhood Bakery into a Michelin Darling

By Eric Barton | Oct. 12, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

There’s a rhythm to mornings at Aioli, the kind that only comes from a kitchen where every motion has been rehearsed a thousand times. The espresso machine hisses, someone’s brushing egg wash on croissants, and through it all, you can imagine chef Michael Hackman moving like a conductor who already knows how the song ends.

He talks a lot about the importance of mise en place, translated literally as “everything in its place.” In restaurants it’s the ingredients you need for the day, right where it should be. For Hackman, it changed his life. Organization, exacting and precise organization, is a mantra he learned as a young cook at The Breakers, and it’s one that still guides him through each day in his West Palm Beach bakery.

Aioli had long been one of those insider places—where locals lined up for the breakfast sandwiches and tourists stumbled upon it, wondering how something so careful could feel so casual. Then, in 2025, Michelin arrived with its first guide to the Palm Beaches and handed Aioli a Bib Gourmand, vaulting this neighborhood bakery onto the national stage. For Hackman, it was validation that craftsmanship and humility could share the same counter space. For everyone else, it was a reminder that great food in South Florida isn’t always plated under chandeliers or disco balls.

Chef Michael Hackman

Hackman grew up outside Chicago, where family gatherings meant a kitchen full of noise and sifted flour. “What’s always stayed with me are the family get-togethers and traditions,” he says. “I remember the things everyone loved—my grandma’s fudge around the holidays, Aunt Peggy’s cookies, my great-grandma’s pickled vegetables from the garden.”

Those family gatherings, and the things they ate at them, are the basis for everything he does now, Hackman says, from the holidays and crab boils at home to the restaurant. Then and now, “the kitchen has always felt like home. Having friends over, cooking together, opening a bottle of wine—the rest of the world can wait until we’re finished eating.”

At The Breakers and later The Four Seasons and Café L’Europe, Hackman absorbed the formality of Palm Beach dining rooms—crisp linens, perfect sauces, a kind of hospitality that leaves no detail to chance. “Those kitchens taught me the fundamentals—the old-school way of cooking,” he says. “The long, hard way where everything is made from scratch, with care and patience. Today, everything moves so fast, but at Aioli, we’ve kept that discipline alive. Our sourdough is fermented for 72 hours before it’s baked, our croissants take three days to make—nothing about what we do is rushed.”

Before opening Aioli in 2014, Hackman spent years as a private chef and consultant, but it was a weeklong sourdough course in San Francisco that changed his trajectory. “I completely fell down the sourdough rabbit hole,” he says. “I became obsessed—couldn’t stop trying to perfect a simple loaf of bread, something humans have been making for thousands of years.”

He took classes at the San Francisco Baking Institute and interned at Balthazar and Daniel Boulud’s commissary bakery, learning everything from fermentation timing to scaling production without compromising quality.

“Once I was finally happy with my loaf,” he says, “the next challenge was learning how to make a thousand of them a day in a small kitchen—what eventually became Aioli Sourdough Bakery & Café.”

He runs Aioli with his wife, Melanie, who manages the front of house and brings the same precision to hospitality that he brings to the dough. Together they’ve built something rare in Palm Beach: a café that’s as disciplined as it is relaxed. “It all goes back to mise en place,” Hackman says. “Everything in its place. There’s a lot of scheduling, forecasting, spreadsheets and checklists that keep things running smoothly at Aioli. Our croissants take three days, our focaccia takes four, our brioche takes three. It’s a constant rhythm of planning and patience.”

He still talks about bread like it’s alive. The starter that fuels Aioli’s loaves has been nurtured for years, and so has the café itself—evolving from a sandwich shop into a pillar of the community.

Hackman says he’s got a lot coming. There’s a sourdough bagel he’s trying to make perfect. The bakery is working on a line of pantry staples now, like sourdough crackers and bottled chili crunch. And they’ve just launched a fall menu: pumpkin muffins, tarts and kouign-amanns with bourbon and pecan, pumpkin cinnamon buns, chocolate walnut tarts, and an apple pie.

For Hackman, the constant evolution isn’t a departure—it’s the point. “It’s about continuing to evolve while keeping the same hands-on, local approach that’s always defined us,” he says.