The story and philosophy of Burbank native Randall Michael Tobin
The first thing you notice is the counter.
It’s a solid slab of wood, smooth from wear but clearly handcrafted, anchored at the front of a tiny Burbank bakery that smells like toasted crust and warm butter. While customers study loaves lined up in neat rows, Randall Michael Tobin will casually mention that he built that counter himself—skills he picked up in junior high school shop class half a century ago and still uses every day.
Then, somewhere behind the oven, a timer beeps.
“That timer means I need to change something on the ice right now,” he’ll say, ducking away for a moment, tending to dough that’s on its own slow, three-day journey toward becoming bread. In this small, unlikely storefront, Randall’s entire life seems to converge: music, electronics, graphic design, health, and an almost missionary zeal for making people happy—one slice at a time.
From Burbank to Baldwin Hills (and Danny Elfman)
Randall was born in Burbank and spent the first seven years of his life not far from where his bakery now stands. He attended Thomas Jefferson Elementary on the northwest side of town, before his family moved to Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles.
There, at his new elementary school, he fell into orbit with another kid who loved performing: a boy named Danny Elfman. They were in the same grade, friends who lived close enough to hang out and “jam” together. Later, at Audubon Junior High, Elfman went into drama and school plays while Randall gravitated toward orchestra and industrial arts.
Junior high turned out to be a pivotal chapter. The school offered an industrial arts program that today feels almost fantastical: woodshop, metal shop, drafting, print shop, plastics, leatherwork—an entire ecosystem of hands-on skills. Randall sampled all of it.
“Each of those classes that I took, I actually learned skills that I still use today,” he says. The wooden counter in the bakery? That’s woodshop. The design sensibility behind his packaging and newsletters? That’s partly print shop—where he learned to set type by hand, handling tiny metal letters, understanding “leading” not as a setting in software but as literal strips of lead slipped between lines of type.
Years later, when everything moved to computers, the terminology wasn’t foreign; it was déjà vu. “When I saw type on a screen, I knew where everything came from,” he says. “I knew what you meant by ‘leading’ because I used to put the lead in there.”
Electronics, a Fork in the Road, and the Air Force
High school, by contrast, didn’t enchant him. Photography was the one class he genuinely loved. He dabbled in electronics and marched in the band as a walk-on drummer, but mostly he just wanted out. College held no appeal.
Instead, his mother suggested he talk to an Air Force recruiter. His older sister had joined the year before and was doing well. Randall could feel that staying home meant one more summer of “doing stupid things” with friends—drugs, aimlessness, trouble. He wanted a hard reset.
He took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, and the recruiter’s eyes lit up at his electronics scores.
“With this kind of score in electronics, you can pick your job,” he was told. Randall signed up. That August he landed in San Antonio, Texas, stepping off a plane into blistering heat and a wall of shouted commands at Lackland Air Force Base. The culture shock was immediate: shaved heads, marching formations, drill sergeants barking orders.
In that moment, instead of panicking, he made a decision: I have four years to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.
He already had two anchors—music and electronics. The Air Force steered him into radio communications, where he learned to repair the equipment that connected pilots in the air with controllers on the ground. But the base also had something else: service clubs with small soundproof rooms, each one containing a piano.
Whenever he could, he would slip into one of those rooms and shut the door behind him. “I would just play and play and play,” he remembers. “I was really moving into the music scene.”
Barracks Studios and Magnum Opuses
After basic training in Texas, he was sent to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, for advanced electronics training. There, a whole other tribe emerged: musicians in uniform, playing guitar, singing in coffeehouses on base, blasting records out the windows of their barracks rooms.
One day he heard something that stopped him in his tracks—a song drifting down from an open window. “It turned out to be ‘Revival’ by the Allman Brothers Band,” he says. When the guy at the window shouted back the name, Randall thought he was saying “Almond” like the nut. He’d never heard of them.
Soon he was hooked. He bought their album at the base exchange and became enamored with their sound, later diving into Live at Fillmore East, which he still calls one of the greatest live albums ever recorded.
As he moved through his service—from Mississippi to Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County, north of San Francisco, and later to Germany—Randall kept building his personal studio. He picked up a Fender Rhodes stage piano in San Francisco, gear from iconic Bay Area music shops, and eventually, in Germany, a four-track tape deck from an audio club for servicemen.
In Germany he met Doug, a gifted multi-instrumentalist and songwriter from another base. In Randall’s barracks studio, they began crafting what they considered their magnum opus, recording on four tracks and bouncing between machines like the Beatles on Sgt. Pepper. Members of the Air Force band joined in, adding drums and arrangements. Eventually, they produced a master reel: Yes One – Tobin and Smith, completed in 1975.
He still has the box, the reel, the photos. Decades later, he reissued it on CD for its 40th anniversary; this year, the music turns 50. “The music turned out awesome,” he says, still clearly proud of the work.
The Studio Years and Many Hats
He sent applications to about 25 recording studios in the area, willing at first to sweep floors or clean ashtrays just to get in. When the only offer he got was exactly that—with no real path forward—he decided to bypass the traditional route.
Instead, he found work with a pro sound company, DFA Electrosound, and later built out his own project studio in the living room of an apartment in Downey. It didn’t take long for someone to notice.
“Somebody said, ‘I love what you’re doing in your project studio. I need something recorded. How much do you charge?’” he recalls. That was his first paying studio client.
From there, his creative career spiderwebbed in multiple directions. He became not just a recording engineer and producer, but also a graphic designer, a typesetter, a package designer for albums, a web designer, and even a computer graphics educator. In the 1990s, he ran an international user group teaching professional computer graphics on Windows, traveling across North America in a suit with a briefcase, consulting for companies like Xerox.
When his four-year enlistment ended, Randall left the Air Force as a sergeant with both a reel-to-reel master and enough gear to call what he had a “recording studio.” There was a brief detour in Florida, where he joined some bands around Fort Walton Beach. Then it was back to L.A.
His philosophy remained consistent: when something he loved doing wasn’t done to his standards—whether it was recording, graphic design, or video—he didn’t complain. He learned how to do it himself, mastered it, and then people started paying him to do it for them.
A Wild Idea: Bread
By 2016, Randall’s recording studio in Burbank was firmly established. Then, in November of that year—almost exactly nine years before the moment he’s telling this story—he had what he calls a “wild idea.”
“I wonder if I can make sourdough bread,” he thought. Not to start a business. Just to give as holiday gifts.
He ordered an organic San Francisco sourdough starter, freeze-dried, and followed the process of bringing it to life—feeding it flour and water, discarding and refreshing daily until it grew bubbly and active. “By the seventh day, it’s rising and falling predictably,” he explains. The wild yeast eats the gluten; bacteria eat the sugars. The mixture becomes a living culture.
It took several weeks before the bread was truly good. But just before Christmas 2016, he hit what he calls “the motherlode.” The loaves came out beautiful—crusty, balanced, fragrant. His wife wrapped four of them as gifts. On Christmas Day, they watched friends and family take their first bites.
“They freaked out,” he remembers. “I freaked out because they freaked out.”
Because the starter was alive, he needed to bake every week to keep it going. So he began a ritual: he’d bake four loaves, keep one for himself, and give three away. His wife started packaging them with tea towels and cutting boards. He’d appear at people’s doors unannounced.
He called it Random Acts of Breadness.
Word spread. Soon he had a list of 100 people waiting for their turn, some waiting up to eight months. “They wanted to buy the bread,” he says. “I said, ‘It’s not for sale. It’s only for giving.’”
Their frustration, he says gently, was “a sign.”
The Plant Paradox and a Mission
Around this time, a longtime friend and client, artist and entrepreneur Dave, suffered a major heart issue. During his recovery, he discovered a book: The Plant Paradox by Dr. Steven Gundry, a heart surgeon who argues that certain plant proteins called lectins can be harmful to the human body.
Dave shared the book with Randall. As he read, Randall had a sinking feeling. Grains—especially whole grains—were on the “no” list. To follow this program properly would mean giving up the bread he’d just fallen in love with making, and the joy of giving it away.
But then he reached a key passage.
There, Gundry described how traditional European bakers made bread that didn’t wreak havoc on the body: using unbleached, organic white flour (with the bran and germ—the lectin-heavy parts—removed) and a long, slow sourdough fermentation, allowing wild yeast and bacteria to break down gluten and other components into something the body could better handle.
“And I realized,” Randall says, “that’s exactly how I’m making my bread.”
He didn’t have to stop. He just had to be deliberate about toppings and other ingredients. By then he was also making sourdough pizza; those, too, could be reimagined to fit within a lectin-conscious, plant-forward philosophy.
The idea of a restaurant began to take shape. Dave, recovered and energized, came to dinner one night for a fully Plant-Paradox-friendly sourdough pizza meal. One bite in, he put down his slice, looked at Randall, and said: “Dude, you gotta open a restaurant. And I’ll help.”
That endorsement turned a private passion into a public mission.
From Backyard Pop-Ups to a Burbank Bakery
Randall began testing the waters with carefully orchestrated backyard events: ticketed pop-up dinners, multi-course plant-friendly Italian menus, then “test run” services where guests thought they would pay from a menu—only to find out at the end that the food was free and tips were optional. The responses reinforced what he’d seen since that first Christmas: people felt good after eating his food. Energized, not weighed down.
Logistically and legally, a full restaurant proved tricky. Then, in early 2021, a friend—an insurance agent—called. One of his clients, who ran an ice cream and pie shop in Burbank, was closing. The space, about two miles from Randall’s home, might be available.
He drove over. It was small—too small for a full café—but it had something priceless: an existing oven hood and the basic infrastructure needed for food production. When he heard the rent, he couldn’t believe it. “The bread angels have led me here,” he thought.
He took over the lease, passed health inspections with almost supernatural ease (“As far as I’m concerned, you can open tomorrow,” the inspector told him), and began baking for real. There was no sprawling menu at first—just bread, a few carefully sourced accompaniments like French butter and local honey, and the beginnings of a gift experience built around cutting boards shaped lke guitars and other bread-centric items.
On opening day in August, they sold out in two hours—over fifty loaves. The next day, they sold out again in an hour and a half. A waiting list formed.
The private reality show he’d quietly documented on his blog—“from concept to concrete,” as he puts it—had officially become a brick-and-mortar reality.
Bread, Buzz, and a Life Woven Together
Since opening, Randall has published a weekly newsletter called The Breadness Buzz without missing a single issue. It’s less a marketing blast than a serialized memoir in motion: life, music, food, health, baseball, customer stories, birthday loaves, and the ripple effects of Random Acts of Breadness in the community.
He still runs his studio. In fact, the bakery has increased his studio work, as bread customers discover he’s also a producer, designer, and consultant. Some are heavy hitters: film and TV composers, Oscar-nominated actors, Grammy-adjacent engineers. Others are locals simply trying to bring their own creative projects to life.
His weekly rhythm is a choreography between two worlds. Mondays he preps starter and handles Every Door Direct Mail postcards he designs himself, sending 800 to 1,200 cards a week to nearby neighborhoods. Tuesday is mostly studio work. Wednesday is baking and logistics. The bakery opens to the public Thursday through Saturday, even on holiday weekends when the dough schedule demands he be in the shop on Thanksgiving Day.
Rest isn’t exactly part of the recipe.
A Philosophy Baked In
Ask Randall about the future, and he doesn’t talk about franchising or scaling up in some soulless way. He imagines more Random Acts of Breadness locations—small, human-scale places, maybe with a bit more room for a soup of the day, organic salads, and a growing line of lectin-aware treats: almond-flour muffins, keto-friendly cookies, shortbread, and spreads like his new garlic butter that transforms a slice into something rivaling your favorite steakhouse garlic bread—but without the “bad side.”
The deeper through-line, though, has little to do with bread and everything to do with how he’s lived his life.
“Whenever I’ve done something that I really love and I’ve overcome all the challenges to making it happen,” he says, “people come to me and say, ‘Can I pay you to do that?’”
He learned electronics because he was curious. Music because he loved it. Graphics because someone else’s work disappointed him. Video for the same reason. Bread because he wanted to make a meaningful gift. In each case, he dove in, refused to be intimidated, and stuck with it long enough to become excellent.
So when he talks to younger creatives, or anyone feeling stuck in a job that doesn’t reflect who they are, his advice is simple and hard and true:
Find something you really love. Make it your own. Do it so well that it reflects who you are. And if you can, start by giving it away—not because you’re strategizing a business, but because it’s “so cool to give it away.”
The business, he says, may or may not come. The joy, the connection, the sense of purpose—that’s guaranteed.
In a small Burbank bakery, under the hum of an oven hood and the glow of a hand-built counter, that philosophy rises every week, baked into loaves that change how people think about bread, about food, and maybe even about what they themselves could create if they followed their own wild ideas.
