On the north end of the Central Coast, in Pacific City, Robyn Bancroft is putting in 12-to-14-hour days baking bread and other goodies while running her crew through a frenetic breakfast and lunch business at the Grateful Bread Bakery and Restaurant.

At the south end, in Depoe Bay, owner Betty Taunton is putting in her own 12-hour days, making use of a friend’s honorary “Doctorate in Pieology” and 40-plus years of experience to keep the hungry hordes at the Spouting Horn Restaurant full of her signature berry, rhubarb, and cream-based pies while wrangling a group of family-member employees and devoted longtime workers.

The two eating establishments that bookend the central Oregon Coast are, despite their dissimilar foods and origins, much more alike than different. This is because the two owners seem motivated by the same culinary ambitions and personal philosophies.

The Grateful Bread’s name came about, Bancroft said, from the original owner’s mangling of the seminal rock group’s name after hearing one of their songs. A good laugh was had over it and a restaurant name was born. (Funky hippie tie-dyed t-shirts for the crew give a nod to the restaurant name’s psychedelic connection.)

The Spouting Horn’s name derives from the sprays of ocean water that burst through open caverns beneath the seawall at Depoe Bay on turbulent days.

Bancroft, 42, has owned the 19-year-old Grateful Bread for almost 10 years.

The self-taught “chief baker” comes in at 4 a.m. and begins making dough for the scones, breads, cookies and other baked items that fill the restaurant with their perfume of yeast, sugar and sourdough starter.

“We did dinners for about four years,” Bancroft said, “but had to run two crews and have eight people on staff, which got to be a lot for us. Now, everyone works five days a week and knows their hours.”

She likes to try different things in the bakery, creating items her customers want but don’t expect. Items such as bread made from spelt, a cousin of common wheat, which often is used by those with wheat allergies or an intolerance to regular high-gluten wheat products.

“We made up 12 loaves recently and sold out in a day,” she said.

Taunton, whose age is best reported only as “somewhat beyond retirement age,” is a dynamo, coming in to the Spouting Horn at about 10 or 11 each day to toil on her pies and other duties until closing time at 10 p.m. Family members had purchased the restaurant — built on Highway 101 in 1934 — in 1944.

In the middle of working through a batch of pies and bread pudding on a recent cloudy Sunday, Taunton spoke of her favorites.

“I’m anxious for strawberry season,” she said. “I get really excited about going into the valley to get those berries and get them into pies.”

Faye Wisniewski, 71, has been working off and on for the Spouting Horn since a few years after her high school graduation.

“I remember my first year here in 1955,” Wisniewski said. “I spilled chowder on a guy, but still got a 25-cent tip, and that was big money back then.”

She has stayed loyal to Taunton throughout the years because she wants to see the restaurant continue to provide the food and service it has for so long.

As befits its status as the elder of the two restaurants, the Spouting Horn tends to feature home style “comfort seafood,” Taunton’s renowned made-from-scratch pies and other baked goods, and the stomach-filling, two-evening-a-week Chuckwagon Buffets.

Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the Spouting Horn’s line of tables along a wall of windows overlooking the bridge, seawall and inlet fill up first. With seagulls and other water birds on the railing outside staring down customers inside the restaurant, those windows sometimes give one the impression they are viewing an aquarium.

Lunch means crab and shrimp louies, crab and cheddar sandwiches and a massive prawn, bottom fish and oyster seafood plate. The $12.95-each (per adult) Chuckwagon Buffets at 5 p.m. on Thursday and Sunday nights feature roast beef, baked chicken, deep-fried bottom fish and shrimp salad.

At the Grateful Bread, “everything’s made from scratch,” Bancroft said. Items range from challah bread, French toast with Marionberry-apple compote or gingerbread pancakes for breakfast to the restaurant’s signature “Dory-Caught” grilled cod sandwich for lunch, which is served on one of Bancroft’s bakery buns.

Other lunch items include fish tacos with black beans and a baked spinach, cheese and tomato-stuffed focaccia. A pizza menu rounds out the offerings, and features items such as Greek olives, feta cheese and roasted red peppers adorning Bancroft’s original pizza dough.