Flour & Co to Bring Classic American Pastries to Berkeley

The Bay Area bakery boom continues, as Nob Hill's Flour & Co bakery plans to expand their operations to the East Bay. Berkeleyside reports that owner Emily Day has signed a lease for the old Bread Workshop space in Berkeley, with plans to open a larger, roomier version of the original San Francisco bakery.

The 3,700 square-foot space will be a welcome change from Day's current workspace, where limited room meant less opportunity for recipe testing, or even "bringing in more than a ten pound bag of sugar." The new location will boast 35-40 seats, with about two-thirds of the square footage allotted for kitchen space. And since the previous tenant was also a bakery, the only major build-out will be with the retail space, a project under the guidance of design firm Abueg Morris (also behind the design of East Bay eateries Comal and Homeroom). Like the original Hyde St. location, the Berkeley outpost will offer light breakfast and lunch menus composed of soup, sandwiches and salads, as well as classic American baked goods like cookies, muffins, brownies, cakes and pies, "toasty tarts" (Day's version of a Pop Tart) and more. And, coffee aficionados will be pleased to find another Bay Area location serving Portland's Stumptown coffee.

If everything goes according to plan, the Berkeley Flour & Co should be open for business in June. 1398 University Ave., Berkeley