Marti Payseur opened Thistle’s Summit on the south edge of downtown in 2022. Photo: Duane Tinkey
Writer: Anthony Taylor
If you know anything at all about Marti Payseur, the owner and creative genius behind Thistle’s Summit, it’s probably that she’s a baker. And sure, that’s mostly by design: As the driving force behind one of the only completely vegan, completely gluten-free bakeries on God’s green Earth, she’s gotten very good at promoting her goods. Her oatmeal cream pies have devotees literally following her to her car as she packs up after events.
But “baker” is more than a profession to Payseur, it’s an ethos. Before baking was her livelihood, it was her love language. It’s her happy place, her peace, and her lasting impression on this city and the people who find themselves walking through the bakery door, pulled in by the baked goods or even just the magnetic charm of the woman herself.
Payseur (pronounced PAY-soor) is 6-foot-2, blonde and blessed with a winsome smile and a unique brand of confidence honed through years in a professional kitchen. She’s the kind of person who can dominate a space. In the early days of Thistle’s Summit, at 340 S.W. Fifth St., she didn’t utilize that natural magnetism so much as she surgically weaponized it.
“I would just lie,” she said. “I’d hand out cream pies at farmers markets and say, ‘This is our signature item that everyone’s talking about.’ Nobody was talking about them. But now, if I take them off the menu for a season, people riot.”
But now that she’s firmly established, or as established as a niche bakery in a post-COVID economy can be, Payseur likes to use her charisma and talents to ensure that just about everyone she encounters walks away feeling as if they’re the ones at the center of attention.
There are a couple of stories behind how Payseur settled on the bakery’s name. The “Summit” part is set in stone: Before it was a bakery, Thistle’s Summit was Iowa’s self-proclaimed “Queerest B&B.” Payseur and her then-partner opened it in 2019 in Mount Vernon, a stone’s throw from the Cornell College president’s house, on Summit Avenue.
So how do the thistles come in? The short answer: Thistle was the name of the couple’s dog. But there’s a more philosophical connection, too. “Thistles are pretty prickly,” Payseur said. “They’re hard to root out, even though a lot of people think of them as invasive or a nuisance.”
As a queer-identifying woman in Iowa, the metaphor rings especially true.
There’s a creed she lives by, repeated during our conversations like a mantra: She wants everyone to feel seen, loved and taken care of. The bakery is the conduit, but that set of verbs is what she calls her real life’s work.
“There was this younger couple who came up to me at Pride,” she recalled. “They were holding hands. One of them spoke up and said, ‘My girlfriend is scared to ask, but we were wondering if any of your treats are gluten-free?’ I told them that everything was gluten free, and she started to cry.”
This is not a one-off occurrence.
“Probably once a month, someone cries,” said Megan Bannister, who helps mind the counter at Thistle’s Summit and owns Olio Oddities, in the loft above. “Someone will be so touched, not just that they are able to eat something, but that it can be delicious and enjoyable.”
Another comment Bannister and Payseur hear a lot is that the space they’ve created for the bakery feels welcoming and safe. And while both women point out that Thistle’s Summit has been intentionally designed to feel like a place you’d want to sit and have a chat — a holdover from its bed and breakfast origins — Payseur is also open about the bakery’s current location being untenable in the long term.
The space is small, which limits the inventory. It also lacks an on-site kitchen, requiring Payseur to bake the goods in a community kitchen in the Drake neighborhood. It’s worked for the past five years, but it is not a certified gluten-free space, so the potential for cross-contamination is always a concern.
But while Payseur dreams of moving Thistle’s Summit into a larger, more permanent space, she’s not in any hurry to go where many people think she should. “People are always saying, ‘Oh, you need to be in the East Village,’” she said, noting the popularity of Molly’s Cupcakes and Scenic Route. “The East Village is wonderful. But I don’t want to be somewhere just because it’s the first place everyone assumes I should be.”
Time and fate will tell where the bakery’s next home will be. Maybe she’ll wind up in the Village after all. Maybe someplace less immediate in people’s consciousness, like Dogtown. As a south-sider, I’d like to personally invite her to Southwest Ninth Street. But wherever Thistle’s Summit ends up, Payseur knows that moving is inevitable, a matter of “when” not “if.”
In the meantime, she continues to churn out cakes and pies and cookies and confections, each one vegan, gluten-free and made with love. Thistle’s Summit is, from a baking standpoint, a one-woman show. Payseur is up early every morning, knocking off her shopping list for the day, prepping, mixing and baking for as many as 12 hours each day; it’s even more during busy times like Thanksgiving, when she bakes pre-ordered pumpkin pies from dusk to dawn and rarely sees the sun.
And while so much of it is muscle memory at this point, Payseur finds peace in the meditative repetition of the scooping and rolling of dough. Even on the days when she’s frustrated and exhausted, it’s that mantra that bolsters her: seen, loved and taken care of.
Baked goods are, perhaps more than anything else our species has learned to make, all about comfort and safety. Pie can soothe trauma. Cookies can tell a loved one we’re sorry for their loss. And something as simple as an oatmeal cream pie can bring tears to the face of someone who thought they’d never get to have one.
