Do not head into KNEAD Bakehouse & Provisions thinking this is your standard bakery, much less the old-fashioned south St. Louis vaguely Germanic kind. No gooey butter cake, no dinner rolls and no diner-style coffee made eight hours earlier, the kind that manages to be both weak and sour.
Speaking of sour, where the quality does belong is in sourdough bread, and that’s one of the stars in KNEAD’s crown. AJ and Kirsten Brown began offering his bread at farmer’s markets. A little over a year ago, they opened the small bricks-and-mortar store where Salume Beddu once was.
Most of their business, though – and perhaps it’s different early in the morning; they open at 7.30 Tuesday through Friday, at 8 on the weekend – is eating in, for casual breakfasts and lunches. Seating is at a counter looking out the windows, or at tables, mostly 6-tops, that are shared. Order at the counter after glomming the wondrous contents of the case, pick up a menu on one of the clipboards hanging from a rail just below the glass of the case, and order at the counter. They’ll bring it out to you and bus your table, too; kudos for that graceful touch.
After both a couple of breakfasts and a lunch, it’s mostly very recommendable. As noted above, the deep experience here is in bread rather than pastry, and it shows. Not surprisingly, toasts with various toppings are an all-day item, as is bread and butter. Is $7 a lot of money for that? Thick slices of toasted sourdough come with butter sprinkled with crunchy, coarse salt and parsley, the sort of bread that demands attention and time to eat. Two thick slices are enough for two eaters, so go for it. The other great basic here is coffee, from Blueprint. It’s good, whether it comes with what the spaghetti board calls MO MILK (it’s the equivalent of a latte, and all their milk comes from Ozark Mountain Creamery, down in Mountain Grove, MO) or adding your own after it’s served, but the service is strangely quirky. Once I was the only person whose coffee wasn’t served with the crisp, wafer-thin cookie others got. Another time, I got it without the requested milk. A (large) glass of orange juice tasted like it was squeezed to order. The batch I had was so tart it seemed vaguely grapefruit-like, but that can vary immensely by type of orange and terroir; the orange juice-finicky, like me, can be happy with this.
The food? Oh, yes. The food, for sure. Breakfast sandwiches come on housemade sourdough brioche rolls, not the sweet, fragile things that mess up a sandwich, but rich, savory ones, the expected egg/cheese with or without bacon or sausage, plus a griddled take on a Monte Cristo. The sausage version was moist and rich, a slice of decent tomato and a couple of leaves of tender lettuce laid on. Still, it was a sandwich one might expect, as good as it was. The surprise was the porridge, described as oats, wheatberries, toasted granola and jam. The texture was amazing, as smooth and airy as a zabaglione, the wheatberries and granola giving variation. A couple of slices of ripe pear sat atop for yet more contrast. Spoonful after spoonful, it was shockingly good.
Indeed, for a bakery, this is a great place for spoonable happiness. The mushrooms soup is killer. Note the plural of the fungi; they’re using at least three kinds in the totally vegan soup, along with some onion and garlic, although they’re secondary to the wondrous woodsiness of the main ingredients. This, too, comes with a slice of that bread, making it a whole-lunch dish. The aforementioned brioche also was the holder for a brie-and-porchetta sandwich, the pork being rich and tender, a good partner to the cheese. The side was some chips, and housemade pickles, a dill-ish spear and a slice of pickled green tomato. Good, but not as good as that soup.
The pastries and savory buns are priced like desserts or first courses, not their mass-market equivalents, so don’t be surprised at that. I found a mixed bag on the pastries. A doughnut’s combination of the begamot oil found in Earl Gray tea, which is from a kind of citrus, and some orange, worked well together. But the doughnut was tough, not stale but chewier than expected, with too much gluten development compared to what’s usual. Not so much sticky sweetness in the generously-sized cinnamon roll, which has received much attention, and, whether deliberate or not, the occasional hit of salt – but it had been in the oven a tad too long, affecting the moisture and texture, not burnt, but overdone externally. Yet, on another visit a maple-bacon doughnut was remarkably tender, topped with lardons, not crumbles, of bacon and carrying a hard-to-identify tang that seemed vaguely Asian. Again, all these were generously sized.
Restaurants, says Pollack’s First Law, set their standards by the way they price themselves. I emphasize the costs in order to prepare visitors, not to warn them away. Except for the couple of untoward sweets on one visit, it’s a spot that rewards the hungry and the curious.
KNEAD Bakehouse & Provisions
3467 Hampton Ave.
314-376-4361
Breakfast & Lunch Tuesday-Sunday
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Snug
Sandwiches & Entrees: $8-$13
Comments