SMØR x noissue.

The first day, they made $120.

Sebastian Perez and Sebastian Bangsgaard had just opened a 450-square-foot sandwich shop in the East Village. No basement. Four open-face sandwiches on the menu. They'd borrowed $40,000 from Bangsgaard's uncle, built out the space themselves using YouTube tutorials, and opened the doors because they had to. They had a thousand dollars left.

That was not what they wanted to see on day one.

Seven years later, SMØR has four locations: two restaurants, two bakeries. The sandwich shop that nearly broke them became the foundation for everything that followed. But the growth came slowly. Person by person. Regular by regular. One cardamom bun at a time.

Two Sebastians

Perez and Bangsgaard met in 2015 at a Danish restaurant in New York. Both were born in Denmark. Both had moved abroad. And both were frustrated by the same thing: Scandinavian food in America meant fine dining. It meant Noma. It meant expensive, pretentious, and inaccessible.

"Almost every single culture is represented in a street way or a casual way," Perez says. "Our food was just, like, people only trying to do the next Noma."

They wanted something different. Something that felt like home. The street hot dogs. The open-face sandwiches called smørrebrød (which translates to "butter bread" and is pronounced something like "smør"). The food they actually grew up eating.

They started catering out of Perez's parents' kitchen in 2018. By the end of that year, they'd landed a space in the East Village. It was supposed to be a catering kitchen. They decided to turn it into a café instead.

Bootstrap

The buildout was brutal. They worked six days a week. Mondays were for renovations and prep. The space was so small they continued construction after opening, finishing the restaurant in stages over the next three years.

"We basically worked like dogs for six months," Perez says.

But the smallness forced something useful: intimacy. For the first year, if you walked in on a Tuesday through Friday, it was just the two Sebastians. They knew everyone who came through the door. Regulars showed up three times a week. By the end of the year, they knew the details of their customers' lives.

"Beyond the food, one of the things that really helped us build and solidify the brand was the sense of community we brought," Perez says. "We really built a unique sense of community that we were super proud of and still are."

That community became the foundation. No viral moment. No hockey stick growth. Just steady, organic expansion, one person at a time.

The Bakery

The exhale came when they opened the bakery.

SMØR had been sourcing bread from She Wolf in Union Square. The quality was right, but the dependency was risky. What if She Wolf went out of business? They'd lose so many menu items overnight.

And Perez had always wanted a bakery. Not just for the bread, but for the brand. Bakeries carry things out: cups, bags, pastry boxes. Every item is an opportunity.

A regular named Greg, a poet who'd lived in the building since the 1960s, told them about a space two doors down. The rent seemed too high. They weren't planning to inquire. Greg persuaded them anyway.

They got the space. And when they dug into the history, they discovered something: in the early 1900s, there had been a bakery in that exact spot.

Allen Ginsberg used to live in the building.

Not That Serious

SMØR now has two restaurants (East Village and Clinton Hill) and two bakeries (East Village and Williamsburg). The Williamsburg location is a 3,000-square-foot test kitchen where the team experiments with new breads and pastries. Head Baker Rowan Gill, formerly of Bien Cuit, runs the program.

The menu has expanded far beyond those original four sandwiches. Avocado toast. Cardamom buns. Smoked salmon smørrebrød. Danish hot dogs. The approach is still the same: make Scandinavian food approachable. Get people through the door with something familiar. Let them discover the rest.

"We're not trying to reinvent the wheel," Perez says. "We just want to create a fun space that does really good products, that has really good people working, that makes you feel good and makes you want to return."

The vibe is relaxed but not silent. The music is a little louder than you'd expect. Blood Orange. Steve Lacy. The occasional hip-hop, for the New York of it all.

It's pastries. It's coffee. It's not that serious.

But the thing they learned in that 450-square-foot sandwich shop, the thing that still drives everything: the win isn't getting someone through the door the first time. It's getting them to come back.