Exclusive: Chad Robertson Talks About His New Brooklyn Bakery

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And I'm just about a lot of staff editor at King Arthur Baking, and today we're doing something we have never done before.

We're popping into your feed with a very special bonus episode. Dink Dung! Dink Dung! We're here! Dink Dung!

Wake up, here we are! When our friend Chad Robertson star baker of Tartine Bakery joined our sourdough episode in May, he also gave us some insider information about a new project that he is opening in New York City. And when that episode aired, we weren't at liberty to share all the details of that project, but we are now. So we are sharing that segment of the interview with you here today. Yeah, this is the most exciting bakery news of the year by far.

I mean, it's exciting for me because it's just down the street of Brooklyn for me.

“Yeah, it's also exciting because like have we ever broken news?”

Have you ever in your career broken news? I've broken news many times, but it has been a while. Yes. I started in hard news. Yes, yes.

Yeah, but this is exciting and it's important enough that we wanted to share it. And I love, I also just love just sneaking up on our listeners to say hi. Wasn't New York in April when we were launching the book of pizza? And I had an opportunity, Chad, as an old friend of mine, and I had an opportunity to go see the new space in Brooklyn. And it's just stunning, free standing building in Brooklyn in Williamsburg, which I feel like is sort of a unicorn.

Giant windows flooded with light, beautiful walnut floors and just like a very beautiful space with it upstairs at that they'll use for education. It has a pastry room, it has a bread room. If you have been to any of the tardines, the tardine manufacturing, you know, just like that they also have beautiful design in addition to beautiful breads and pastries.

So the space is very stunning and it's always fun to see a construction site and just see, you know, a bakery emerge out of that.

So I'm super excited. I'm also a very invasive view, not for the first time, and not for the last time. Well, I was once say it's great that you got in the sidewalk because I suspect it will be lines and you'll never get in again. Yeah, and I know how you feel about lines. So I'm never going. I'm just, I'm going to live by Kerosene through this interview. So I'm just going to be like, "Yes, let's hear it."

“So I think that I probably speak for a lot of your fans in asking like, "What's happening now?"”

Like you've relocated from the West Coast, the East Coast, what's going on? Yeah, you know, yeah, it's been quite to journey, you know, kind of looking for new projects to do on my own. And I was connected with someone who's an investor and this guy was in New York and he's like, you know, I need someone to help me. I need someone to help set up like a sourdough pizza thing. I was like, you know, that would be fun. I mean, no big deal.

But, you know, we were looking around in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and we found this building and Brooklyn that was just a very special building. But it was much bigger than, you know, what the original idea of a small pizza place was. And we're not doing pizza. We'll do some version of something, but it's not a pizza place.

There's so much good pizza in New York. It's just like, it's really an incredible time to be here.

And it is, you know, kind of an all day cafe bakery thing on the ground floor like what you might expect, although I'm really trying not to repeat anything I've done before. Just because I feel like there are a lot of people doing stuff really well that, you know, we maybe popularize a long time ago. Yeah. You know, it wasn't there really. There wasn't like everyone wasn't obsessing over the crumb of their loaf and the long fermentation and the high potatoes, you know. Yeah, the cost songs. I mean, like, cost songs, they're just like insane. Like everyone's just, you know, battling, trying to make the most perfect, you know, and it's beautiful.

But I, you know, it's kind of like I want to add something to the already amazing food culture that's here. So I'm really trying to do some different things. And a lot of it, honestly, is in the vein of what book three was, which we worked on together.

And some of it, you know, that's sort of through a lot of the wall, some of its stuff. But none of it except for the outpourage really is ever gone into production at Tarkeens. So, you know, there's a ton of kernels of ideas.

There. And then, you know, going back to the roots that really influenced me when I first started, which is I've written a couple of pieces one for food arts, sadly no longer with us.

You know, you see all these chefs just doing really interesting things around the world. And bread was just kind of bread, you know, like you get it free in a restaurant.

“It's like, wow, like, that's kind of a bummer, you know, like no, you must pay for it.”

I was like, I was really inspired by what I saw going on around the world, the chefs, so I'm pushing out of the boundaries of just, you know, Italian or French or whatever traditional food that we all love. And, you know, just having a little more fun with it. But that wasn't really happening in bread. And I feel like, you know, I was always saying, like, let's have a little more fun and like experiment a little more and just try to explore the diversity of the grain world. You know, and so the TLDR is that instead of a consulting on a small sourdough pizza place, you're now opening an ambitious new all day bakery cafe in Williamsburg.

It's, it's an all day thing. It's the thing that I'm most excited about. I mean, we're making a bunch of good food all day long and, you know, as we do. I mean, that was another thing I'll say that because I trained as a chef before a baker, like when we open tarti, I mean, traditionally bakeries would bake all night, right?

“And then click it, fill the shelves up and the baker's went home and the shopkeepers came in and they sold the stuff for a few hours and then started over again.”

We didn't read, like, I don't like working all night. I just just refused to do that. Also, because I had a restaurant that was a dinner only restaurant and I was there a lot. So it's like, you know, if I'm making croissants and bread, you know, it's six a.m. Then going into bar charting at seven or eight at night and working on stuff with them and there's no time to sleep. So we're not as young as we used to be, Chad, but you know, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, but the other thing is like, I would rather pan some on a hot loaf of bread.

And when people would say, like, how did tartine get so big or whatever, and it didn't for a really long time, by the way, but eventually did. And a lot of it was just me traveling around like learning from other people and being kind of ambassador for whatever.

“Whatever it was, I thought I was doing it was a lot of fun and I learned a ton going around.”

But a lot of people knew about tartine because I was doing a lot of that and even though it was just this tiny place on the corner.

But for me, I was always like, let's just bake in real time, you know, small batch baking like all that stuff that's very common now.

I wasn't really the way most American bakeries operated. And then even like when I have chefs come and, you know, like, when bread baking became more popular and lots of cooks and chefs wanted to make the transition baking that would come in and they would be like, man, this is like a restaurant, but like dinner services 10 hours long. It's just not a stop for like this is way, like you're not getting orders who just constantly making stuff and people are in the line, you know. So, but we kind of approached when we opened tartine, we kind of approached it like a restaurant without, you know, just like kind of giving people fresh stuff all day.

And that was that what you're thinking about for the new spot too, that same sort of. Yeah, it'll be, it'll be that and then, I mean, the part that I'm most excited about actually is upstairs is where we built. Where we built like a kitchen, the mills upstairs. It's basically a teaching space in a space that I can host friends from. The city friends from here and friends from around the world, which, you know, we've always done that with tartine and bar tartine and that's just because it's kind of like the most fun thing for me is just to bring other people together and learn from each other.

But that was always like sort of doing it after hours or, you know, on a slow day or whatever, now we've built like a space that's dedicated to that.

And I'm super excited to just invite all my friends to come and do wonderful things together. So, so for me it's, you know, it is an all day cafe bakery, but, you know, even that part, like I said, everything's going to be new. And everybody's going to be sort of trying to push it, you know, push everything in a direction like I said, I want to keep it in the sweet spot where people want to, you know, some see days a week and get there. There's staples, but something, I want to add, I want to add to the already, you know, really inspiring food community beer.

So exciting. I can't wait. I can't wait. And I think a lot of people will be excited to, you know, to hear this news and to come and see you in this next chapter.

And could you tell us the name of the new spot?

“The name is Altbow, which means old building. And when you see the building, you'll understand sort of why we were really smitten with the building and then, you know,”

but also it's like, I feel like, you know, I'm kind of an old building myself and I have it real. It just feels like the right name we got friends and texts into the branding and that all this kind of came together.

Very, sort of, sort of naturally, like part of the inspiration in the beginning was the bowhouse. I've always just loved. It was a very short lived movement.

I always loved how they sort of just smashed together, art and craft and kind of made, you know, made no distinction between the two and this is just your life. And, you know, I love a couple of blocks away. It is going to be my life and I want to, I want to have like, Tartino has had a ton of musicians and artists, you know, like making coffee in the more, you know, it's like, I want to have that kind of a hub where it's just, you know, people are there doing interesting things all the time. And so, yeah, there was some inspiration there.

It's also where that's easy for people to pronounce like, you know, like, it's a little bit, you know, foreign, but like, Tartino, but easy enough. So I was trying to strike that balance. But my partner was the one that actually, he's, he spends a lot of time in Berlin and he, he loved that word and, I didn't know what it meant when I heard, I was like, that, I like that word and then it all kind of made sense. So I started and we're restoring the building, it's an old building, it's gorgeous, but, you know, we're putting like reclaimed old growth, walnut floors that came from a bakery in Long Island city from, you know, the late 1800s.

So it's like, we're really honoring the building and, you know, it's just a very central location and Brooklyn. So it's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. I can't wait to come see you there. Thanks for being so generous with your time and your knowledge for listeners and and for me personally and come break with bread with you and Brooklyn real soon. You're looking forward to it. Thank you, Jess. Thanks. Bye.

Bye. Man, I love breaking news. I hope we can do it more often. We are. We're breaking news podcast now. Yeah, this is, we're basically CNN. And you know, I know it is surprising that we hopped on with this bonus episode, but, you know, when you've got news to share, you've got to share it. So,

I appreciate as always our listeners for listening.

“Yep. Yep. Remember to like and subscribe on Apple podcast, YouTube Spotify, Amazon, music, or wherever you listen to podcasts because you never know what we're going to be popping in with a special breaking news episode.”

You never know and you could leave us a review while you're there or you could share this episode. This breaking news episode or any of the other episodes with a friend. And in the meantime, still advice forever. Follow the recipe. Follow the recipe. Thingspakers know was hosted and executive produced by me, David, to marketing.

And me, Jessica Battalana. Rossi and as to Pula was our senior producer. Chad Shania is our producer and Marcus Bagala is our engineer, original music by Megan and Marcus Bagala. And also big thanks to Chad Robertson, who's just the goat for joining us on this week's episode. You can learn more about him and his new projects via his Instagram @TartineBaker.

Thingspakers know is a King Arthur Baking Company podcast. This episode is brought to you by Brought and Taylor. Brought and Taylor is an independent family-owned company that builds tools for all breadbakers at every level to transform complex baking challenges into simple pleasures. I love Brought and Taylor. I mean, they are so passionate about bread and baking when I talk to those folks.

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