Little Sky Bakery's cinnamon-raisin pain de mie.

Little Sky Bakery, a popular standby at farmers markets up and down the Peninsula, now has a permanent home in Menlo Park.

Owner Tian Mayimin and her team have quietly started selling loaves of fresh bread, bialys and scones out of 506 Santa Cruz Ave., on the ground floor of a new development across from the Menlo Park Caltrain station.

Notably, Mayimin has also taken over the former Borrone MarketBar space at 1010 El Camino Real across the street, where she’ll open a cafe with more prepared foods and coffee in a few months, called Little Sky Kitchen.

Together, the two spaces will allow Mayimin to dive deeper into her obsession with all things naturally leavened, from bread and pizza to Chinese dumplings. The menu will expand to include staples from her native Xi’an in Northwest China, including rou jia mou, a steamed bread stuffed with meat that’s often referred to as a Chinese hamburger. Baozi, enormous steamed dumplings filled with pork, shrimp and purple kale, or tofu and chives, a Chinese New Year staple in Mayimin’s family, will be on offer.

The cafe will also serve pizzas made from naturally leavened dough, open-face sandwiches on a dense German seeded bread and elaborate layered cakes — plus, soft serve ice cream.

“It’s so fascinating how all these different cultures have been using wild yeast,” Mayimin said. “There are so many cool human traditions that are so fun to keep building on.”

Bakers make bread inside Little Sky Bakery's new retail space in Menlo Park.

The Santa Cruz Avenue bakery is now Little Sky’s home base, where employees are baking for the farmers markets stands, pop-ups and home deliveries. The 1,200-square-foot space allowed the business to almost double its baking capacity, Mayimin said.

Customers can buy baked goods warm out of the oven there from 9 a.m. to 1 pm. Wednesday through Sunday. Expect an assortment of bread, onion-parmesan bialys, enormous chocolate chip cookies and golden loaves of cinnamon-raisin pain de mie, among other Little Sky staples. There’s no seating, but grab a coffee at the next-door Philz Coffee and use their tables. (When it opens, Little Sky’s space across the street will have outdoor tables.)

Since its debut in 2017, Little Sky has fast become one of the Peninsula’s most popular bakeries. Mayimin, a former lawyer turned passionate home baker, got her start baking naturally leavened bread in her Menlo Park home and delivering it around town. She showed up to her first-ever farmers market with just 20 rounds of bread in a basket. The same century-plus-year-old starter she used then fuels all the breads today.

Little Sky Bakery is now selling fresh bread out of a permanent space in Menlo Park, like this naturally leavened raisin-walnut bread, left, and seeded stoneground whole wheat, right.

Now, people line up for her baked goods at more than 10 farmers markets throughout the region. Little Sky recently started popping up on Fridays at State Street Market, the splashy new Los Altos food hall, and St. Michael’s Alley in Palo Alto. A dozen employees bake an impressive range of products, from sesame-date bread to massive, calzone-like turnovers filled with flavorful artichokes, mushrooms, Parmesan cheese, zucchini and berbere. They recently added house-cured lox and ham and cheese baguette sandwiches; expect additions like fried tofu down the line.

The new bakery will be a testing grounds for new items, like lemon poppyseed muffins with citrus from Mayimin’s backyard tree or focaccia studded with fresh herbs.

Mayimin lights up when asked about the potential for even more naturally leavened goods. She’s drawn to fast-casual foods — not in the tradition of Chipotle, but rather the street vendors of Xi’an that sell fresh, high-quality fare you can eat in the moment. Bagels, pretzels and potstickers may be in Little Sky’s future.

Elena Kadvany is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: elena.kadvany@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ekadvany

Elena Kadvany joined The San Francisco Chronicle as a food reporter in 2021. Previously, she was a staff writer at the Palo Alto Weekly and its sister publications, where she covered restaurants and education and also founded the Peninsula Foodist restaurant column and newsletter.