New Bakery Provides 'Sweet Retreat' in Tiverton

Take your sweet tooth to 14A Stafford Road in North Tiverton for a new bakery, Sweet Retreat, where the owners are boasting about their pastries and real cream-filled doughnuts.

It opened on Oct. 29 and is located in the small plaza after the Stafford Road split with William S. Canning Boulevard near the .

“We want people to know we make everything from scratch,” said Erika Relihan, co-owner. "We’re not like your normal bakery. We don’t use boxed anything.”

Relihan, a 2008 graduate of Johnson and Wales University from Westport, MA, works alongside co-owners John and Joanne Moura, restaurateurs and bakers from Providence. They operated Buono Appettito on Washington Street in the 1970s.

In the small space of a former Tiverton bakery, Mr. Moura said they began the Sweet Retreat venture aiming to be different.

“We want to go back to the original way of doing things, and resemble some of the old school bakeries,” he said, adding they found out about the space for sale on Craigslist. “We came down, looked at it, and it looked perfect for what we wanted to do.”

The bakery, operating in such a small space, is strictly a traditional call and walk-in for orders operation. Relihan said the first week was a “little slow” at times but added they’re ready to start pumping out their advertising campaign.

“The traffic flow is really good,” she said. “We want to let people know we’re here.”

Sweet Retreat offers an array of pastries, such as whoopie pies, éclairs, pecan bars, cannolis, cream horns, all types of doughnuts, fruit tarts, cupcakes, lemon bars, cake bites, cookies and brownies. They also offer a selection of special occasion cakes, such as carrot and strawberry cream, as well as pies.

Relihan added they are doing a November promotion, where all customers receive one free doughnut on Saturdays.

Sweet Retreat is open Wednesdays to Sundays and is closed Monday and Tuesday. Copies of their menu are available at the shop. Moura and Relihan said they are working to get a website running as soon as possible.