Bells chime as the front door of the bright yellow house on the corner of Vineyard Street swings open. A small head of brown hair peers up from behind the register at the slew of new customers filing into the bakery. 

“Good morning, welcome to Four Sisters Bakery; how may I help you?” chirps the tiny voice of an 8-year-old Athena Magbual.  

Behind her in the kitchen, between trays and trays of steaming hot butter rolls, pandesals, and ensaymadas, cousins, uncles, and aunties bake and bicker over the soundtrack of a Filipino drama playing on the TV.

Though their cable TV is gone and Athena has grown a few inches taller and moved far from home to New York City, the bakery remains virtually the same. The familiar smell of butter rolls and cinnamon buns continues to waft through the small space, and family members file in and out to help out in the kitchen or pick up a box of treats, some with new family members of their own. 

“When I smell the bakery, I know I’m home,” said Athena Magbual. 

A Bakery Is Born 

Four Sisters Bakery opened in 1983 after Athena’s grandfather, Stanley Magbual, was laid off as a carpenter. With 10 children to feed — two of his kids have stayed in the Philippines — Stanley began baking at his sister’s house. When neighbors started lining up down the street for his baked goods, Stanley decided to open a bakery. 

The bakery is named after the four daughters Stanley brought with him to Hawai’i. Stanley never had a formal baking degree but learned all the necessary skills while working as a baker at the Pan de Manila Bakery in the Philippines. He passed on this knowledge to his children, particularly his son Arnold, who began helping at the bakery at a young age. 

“I was 13 years old when I started learning to make the dough,” said Arnold. “Everything was manual, no machine, no mixer, everything was by hand, so you needed to know the technique of doing it, of making it nice and sticky.”

Arnold received a degree in Culinary Arts from the University of Hawai’i Maui. He worked as a cook at the Maui Intercontinental Hotel and then at the Grand Wailea Hotel for 10 years. In 2003, Stanley offered to sell the bakery to Arnold, and ownership swiftly switched from one generation to the next.

“There are probably other jobs out there for me, but this is the job that’s meant for me,” said Arnold. “My dad wanted this, for me to run the bakery, the last of his legacy, and he entrusted me with the bakery, so it’s a responsibility of mine to keep it going.”

A Family Business for the Young and the Old

It’s not unusual to see a handful of kids sitting on the white stairs on the side of the bakery or lounging on bags of flour in the back. When Athena was younger, her playpen was tucked away in the corner of the store. 

“Sometimes my nephews and nieces sit down on the stairs, and customers can’t even recognize that it’s a bakery. Instead, they think it’s a nursery,” said Marjorie Magbual, Athena’s mom, with a laugh. “Everybody grew up in the bakery.” 

Each family member had a job to do at the bakery, from the younger kids folding boxes upstairs to the aunties and uncles preparing the different doughs and packing up butter rolls. Marjorie works full-time as a nurse but spends almost all her free time helping at the bakery. She says they began working the cash register once her kids knew numbers. 

Athena’s childhood was made up of cracking dozens of eggs during Thanksgiving or folding boxes while her brother, Noah, worked the register. Everyone donning hair nets in the kitchen at Four Sisters Bakery has always been and continues to be family. 

“There’s pros and cons working with family because you can never actually fire them, but the loyalty is there — they always come back,” said Arnold. “My brother was a full-time cook, and we would always argue, but in the end, he would always come back to help me during our busy seasons.”

Keeping and Growing the Bakery’s Clientele

When Arnold took over the bakery 21 years ago, he knew that it was his dad’s legacy to the community and that he never wanted to lose it — ”That’s his livelihood.” Arnold promised his dad that when it was time for him to part with the bakery, he would only sell it to someone from their family. 

As per Stanley’s wishes, Arnold and Marjorie kept the price of their goods affordable, acutely aware that their clientele was mostly local working people, just like them. But living in such a diverse place like Hawai’i, they also knew that they had to take into account their customers’ various tastes and preferences. 

“We have to try and cater to all the ethnicities in Hawai’i because there’s so many different people here, so we cannot just be serving specialty Filipino pastries,” said Arnold. “We had to come out with something that was out of our comfort zone and make different kinds of things.”

That’s how they started selling butter rolls, which quickly became one of the staple items of the bakery, with people lining up down the street just to get their hands on them. On average, they make around 200 dozen butter rolls daily, but on Fridays and Saturdays, they go through at least 250 dozen rolls daily. 

This is how the bakery has accumulated plenty of regular customers, both locals and tourists, who come back every year. But what Marjorie loves seeing the most is when regulars will return with their kids and grandkids to buy them treats from the bakery over the years. A popular one with the kids is malassadas, a sweet Portuguese fried pastry. 

“Sometimes if we are closed and grandparents try to buy their grandkids malassadas from another bakery, oh my goodness, the kids will throw a tantrum,” said Marjorie. “They can recognize it’s not the same one they usually eat from Four Sisters Bakery.” 

She tilts her head back and lets out a laugh at the memory. “After hearing that, I said, oh, these will be our future customers.” 

“At the end of the day, it’s not actually the awards or recognition we receive that counts, but just seeing people continuing to come back to us happy,” said Marjorie. 

Family and Community Make the Bakery Worthwhile

Four Sisters Bakery has also always given back to the Maui community, whether that be making countless pies during Thanksgiving for Maui and Lāna‘i nonprofits or always having a hot pot of food in their kitchen with enough sinigang — a Filipino meat and vegetable stew — to feed any hungry customer or friend that stops by.

“My mother-in-law always said that when you cook, you can’t just cook for yourself. You have to cook for everyone,” said Marjorie. “Sometimes we have customers that are our good friends that stop by, smell the food, and ask ‘what are you cooking?’ so, of course, we offer them lunch, telling them ’okay, okay, come over here, come eat,’ and of course, they will say yes.” 

Though, more often than not, the work can be very tough and time-consuming, Arnold and Marjorie have always been grateful to be able to run a business alongside their family. Marjorie notes how she hopes to do this work alongside her family for the next 15 to 20 years.  

“I would say this is a hard job, but it does really help a lot, especially if you live in Hawai’i where everything is expensive, but we manage,” said Marjorie. “We manage because we have our family that helps us.”

“Working with family is a blessing,” said Arnold.