On a Thursday afternoon in February, an emergency medical responder bought enough cake from Lloyd’s Carrot Cake Bakery & Café to feed a nearby fire station. He wanted the best for a colleague’s farewell.
The call of the moist dough also drew friends from across the city and beyond. “Best carrot cake I’ve ever had,” said Castle Hill resident David Pérez, a sentiment shared by many. Nearby, visitors from Boston and Chicago dug in.
Brandon Adams, Lloyd’s co-owner, credits the bakery’s success to family, quality products and community. That ethos drove him and his sister, Lilka Adams, to open the new East Harlem branch at 1565 Lexington Ave. Staff say business has been brisk at the new location, which is the first of Lloyd’s locales to serve Costa Rican coffee and specialty teas. Others have been grab-and-go only. In East Harlem, people can now have their coffee and their carrot cake too.
“We have the cake from my dad’s side, the coffee from my mom’s side, and we’ve kind of married the two,” Adams said.
Cake and cafe origins
One of Adams’ earliest memories of carrot cake came in Van Cortlandt Park, across from the original Lloyd’s location, where he was stung by a bee at age 4. Growing up, coffee wasn’t on the menu alongside cake. But his mother, Betty Campbell-Adams, prized coffee from her homeland of Costa Rica and the way it complemented cake and muffins. After a family trip to Costa Rica in 2010, Adams developed a taste for it.
“When you go to Costa Rica, you have to have the coffee,” he said. “When you come to Lloyd’s now, you have to have the coffee.”
The family history baked into the business is easy to trace along the brick wall of portraits, a map of the island of St. Thomas (his father’s homeland) and certificates of recognition from elected officials. Plaques chronicle the story of Lloyd’s, from a 1987 New Yorker article to more recent coverage of the East Harlem opening.
In the mid-1970s, Adams’ father, Lloyd, was drafted into the NBA by the Washington Bullets but was injured before he could play. While he later worked in drug rehabilitation, he kept basketball in his life by hosting pickup games at Columbia University. Afterward he and his teammates would watch the Knicks at his house (he was the only one with cable), where he would bake cakes for his friends using a recipe he inherited from his mother, who family members simply called “Mama.” The cake became a tradition, and eventually someone suggested he sell it.
Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem became the first wholesale client. Soon his routine involved baking at night, selling by day to neighborhood cafes, restaurants and supermarkets. His wife was the duo’s marketing arm, calling business owners to pitch the cakes.
A makeshift commercial kitchen in Adams’ grandmother’s basement (down the block from the new East Harlem café) eventually gave way to a Riverdale headquarters in 1986, initially for wholesale only. But neighbors began asking how they could buy what they were smelling.
Baking in legacy
In the 2000s, Adams’ father developed kidney failure and died in 2007, despite his mother donating a kidney. She took over the business, refining the branding her late husband loved — the smiling carrot and “made from scratch” messaging. She drummed up major media attention during her tenure, including coverage by Oprah Winfrey, one of the women she most admired.
Her sudden death in December 2020 left her children to continue the business. Adams recalled leaving the hospital and heading straight to the bakeries. “Decisions needed to be made, people needed to be paid,” Adams said. “It could not stop — it’s not what they would want.”
His parents’ legacy was honored with a street co-named after them: Betty and Lloyd Way. It was a testament, Adams says, to the community his parents had built, from hosting bake sales to letting neighbors use the space. During the early months of the pandemic, his mother had helped the Female Fight Club gather there before it became a full-fledged gym in Riverdale.
Wholesale relationships remain part of the business, including partnerships his father started in the 1980s with iconic spots like Jimbo’s Hamburger Place. Sometimes Adams will get a call from staff at a business where he helped deliver cake as a kid, such as Pizza Plus in Brooklyn, whose owner remembers passing him a slice. Even vendors they use for flour and sugar remember him riding on a delivery trolley when he was 6 or 7: “I carry my dad in my face,” he said.
Some wholesale relationships have ended as venues like Sylvia’s now bake their own cakes. And while retail sales now make up the majority of the business, the Lloyd’s truck is still on the road four days a week across New York City and New Jersey making wholesale deliveries. It’s an opportunity to tap into hyperlocal markets and introduce the cake to new potential clients.
“My dad’s thing was, you just have to get them to try,” Adams said.
Building on a classic
Adams and his sister have expanded into new creative partnerships. Sweet Chick, which also sells Lloyd’s cakes, turns the cake into waffles and pancakes topped with whipped cream cheese frosting. Cafe Panna has infused Lloyd’s cake into its gelato. In 2022, the siblings partnered with Vans to design a Lloyd’s sneaker and T-shirt.
As the staff has grown, Lloyd’s has added new cakes, including marble and red velvet-vanilla blends. “We really want our staff and our bakers to be creative and feel like they have an opportunity to think outside the box,” Adams said.
Unsurprisingly, carrot cake remains king at Lloyd’s. The grating machines run faster than they once did, the pizza oven has been replaced by a convection oven and retail sales surpass wholesale. But the basics have stayed the same, down to the hundreds or thousands of carrots grated daily.
“We try to stay true to the baking standards that were set by our parents,” Adams said. “People don’t take that for granted.”
1565 Lexington Ave. in Manhattan.
Reserve a cake for pickup in East Harlem.
Call East Harlem location at 212-831-9156.
great product.