Photograph by Martha Williams
You can’t be in McEntyre’s Bakery for more than a few minutes before a regular walks in or an employee greets a customer by name. The bakery’s followers are legion, thanks to its friendly staff and a dizzying array of delicious, fresh-from-the-oven offerings.
The Smyrna-based family business was founded in 1947 by Howard McEntyre Sr. and his son, Howard Jr., after the latter returned from a tour of duty with the Marines in World War II. Now it’s run by fourth-generation owners Ryan McEntyre and his wife, Joy, with occasional appearances by their four children.
As a longtime community favorite, McEntyre’s Bakery holds another distinction. It may be Smyrna’s oldest continuously operating business. “Smyrna’s city council had an event honoring the area’s oldest businesses. None of them were older than 1947,” says Ryan.
“We’re an old-school, down-home Southern bakery,” Ryan says, a sentiment reinforced by the display cases stocked with colorful iced sugar cookies, decorated layer cakes, thumbprint cookies, cheese Danish, and gingerbread men, as well as shelves lined with baked-daily fluffy white bread and hearty 12-grain loaves.
After renting for decades, the business bought and moved to its current space on Concord Road in 2007, a switch that allowed for both physical expansion of the retail space and a patio dining area. A more robust menu now includes made-to-order breakfast and lunch sandwiches and takeaway savory items such as pimento cheese and chicken salad, a signature recipe by Ryan’s mom, Diana. She and Ryan’s father, Steve, are still behind the scenes most days. “For pretty much every cake that’s made and all the scratch-made stuff, my dad has had a hand in it. He’s the one who taught me,” says Ryan, who got his start when, at three years old, he was tasked with placing liners in cupcake pans.
Keeping the bakery going is a labor of love for the McEntyres and their staff of 24. Ryan arrives at 4:30 a.m. five days a week—on the heels of an employee who preps the freshly made doughnuts starting at 2:30 a.m.—to start each day’s baking. The output is staggering: In December alone, they turned out 11,000 bite-size “cake squares” (petit fours) and 120,000 hand-piped cheddar cheese straws. The latter was listed by John T. Edge in his 2008 Garden & Gun article, “100 Southern Foods You Absolutely, Positively Must Try Before You Die.”
Special items offered occasionally online, such as the decadent chocolate TV bars, sell out before the batch is made. “We’re a special place to a lot of people, so a big part of why we do what we do is loyalty to our customers,” Ryan says. Bargain-hunting visitors love the 99-cent rack, stocked with discounted items, such as bags of slightly sweet cornbread muffins, glazed doughnuts, and generous slices of strawberry or coconut cake.
As Smyrna has developed over the years, some regulars have moved farther out of town. So a decade ago, McEntyre’s opened a kiosk in the Dallas, Georgia, antique store Magnolia Market Too, where customers can shop an abbreviated menu and order custom items to be delivered from the Smyrna headquarters.
McEntyre’s following even extends to celebrity fans. Over the years, the bakery has been tapped to make cakes for Harry Connick Jr. and Sir Elton John and even to make one to celebrate former president Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday. Still, it’s the cadre of regulars that make it all worthwhile. “Our biggest gift and blessing is our generational customers,” says Joy. “To us, they are more than customers—they are relationships.”
This article appears in our June 2025 issue.
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