The Fork: We Need to Talk About Baked & Brew

Way back in May of this year, our editor visited and wrote about a then-soon-to-open bakery and breakfast/brunch spot dubbed Baked & Brew. The brainchild of trained culinary masterminds, biz partners and best buds Nicole Appels and Kate Holland, the bakery was supposed to open at the corner of Baca Street and Cerrillos Road in mid-June. And though that didn’t happen, Appels and Holland fully opened just about a week ago and we’re here to say it SLAAAAAAAAAAAPS.

Now, normally SFR wouldn’t review a place that just opened. Usually new restaurants are working out the kinks and figuring out their point-of-sale systems and training new employees and so on. This is most certainly the case at Baked & Brew right now, so if you visit, do so with kindness in your hearts. Still, after the items we ordered and ate in, like, eight minutes, we just really need people to know how much promise we see for Baked & Brew. We’ll probably go back tomorrow (which we say knowing full well we don’t know what day you’re reading this). So, yeah, don’t think of this as a review so much as us telling you that we went to a place.

By the time we arrived a little after noon, many of the bakery case items had sold out. While some might find this disappointing, your old pal The Fork finds it lovely—like the people of Santa Fe are saying, “We just loved everything they made so much we bought it all.” We did manage to get out the door with a breakfast sandwich of bacon and scrambled eggs on house made focaccia, a gorgeous hazelnut mousse bar and the very last chocolate éclair.

First off, that sandwich. Oh, that sandwich. We’ll admit we were disappointed to learn Baked & Brew had sold out of croissants the day we visited, but pivoting to focaccia was happy accident. Holland and Appels’ bread is so good, in fact, that it might have replaced the flaky croissant as our go-to bread for brekkie sammies (we hope you loved reading the words “brekkie sammies” as much as we loved typing them, Jeff). The added thick-cut bacon was a revelation of textures, from the crispy edges to the tender centers—and this was no one-strip affair, either, no sir/ma’am, enby. This sandwich was practically stuffed with bacon, and at $10.75, more than worth it, especially considering that and the whole they-made-the-bread thing.

The hazelnut mousse bar ($4.50, which is honestly a STEAL) was also a dream of brilliantly thick chocolate mousse infused with a subtle hazelnut flavor and topped with mini dollops of stiff whipped cream, chocolate shavings and chopped hazelnut. Oh, baby, we just ate this thing a minute ago and we’re still thinking about it and wishing we’d bought two. Actually, you know what? Here’s a photo. Look at it. LOOK AT THIS THING!!!!

The éclair, meanwhile, went to a different SFR worker, who said it was “pretty good.” Now, we don’t know if he’s ever worked in a bakery as your old pal The Fork has, but we know two things to be true: Making the choux for an éclair at high altitudes is the stuff of bakery legend, and this one was so beautiful we almost died. We notice this person didn’t offer us a bite, and that the whole thing was gone by the time we checked in a mere few minutes after he got his mitts on the thing, so...we think he’s full of shit, and we’ll just have to get that eclair for ourselves next time.

If we were forced to identify an issue, and really, this is so ultimately small and might just be our own little bugaboo, it’s in how, when you order coffee, the workers dictate how much cream or oat milk or whatever goes into your cup. People have so many different desires for how much stuff to put in their coffee that it’s almost always better to give us the choice ourselves.

Otherwise? We could not be more thrilled with Baked & Brew, so we encourage you to go spend money there because we want it to exist for a long, long time.

...because it has the word “baked” in it.

Snack Corner

Heads up there are great organic cherries all over the place right now, and we’re gonna eat ‘em all like a cherry-eating version of Pokémon.

Also

-Don’t forget about the 5th Annual Santa Fe Beer and Food Festival going down at El Rancho de las Golondrinas on Saturday, Aug. 5 and Sunday, Aug. 6. We hear there’ll be beer...and food. Music, too, we bet. We hear would-be attendees are highly encouraged to get tickets ahead of time, so hurry through that link above!

-Vara Vinoteca (which SFR wrote about back in November of ‘22) has officially reopened after maintenance concerns caused it to close in April. There are only so many days left to drink wine this summer before coldness forces us back in to drink...we dunno, port or brandy or something. Don’t yell at us about wine/port specifics, just, like take the joke, man.

-It seems the upcoming micro food hall from chef Dakota Weiss of Catch Poke slated to open at some point in the old Zia Diner/Café Sonder location on Guadalupe Street has a name: Capital Coal Neighborhood Eatery. This info comes from an eagle-eyed local (literally we’re talking about ourselves) who caught wind on Instagram when Weiss unveiled the upcoming project’s new logo. You can follow Capital Coal here if you want to stay up to date. Thus far we know the food hall is supposed to include Korean BBQ (is that a Santa Fe first? Seriously, we can’t recall a Korean BBQ ever opening here), French dips, fried chicken, desserts and more. We seriously cannot wait.

-This is more of an Albuquerque thing, but please note that the 5th Annual New Mexico Prickly Pear Festival is coming up this Sept. 23. We’re telling you early for two reasons—not only are we not sure people will remember a prickly pear event without putting it on their calendars now, we 100% know we’ll forget otherwise. So, yeah, it’s all things prickly pear with hundreds of vendors and demos and more. Click that link above for the website.

-Closer to home (for us people and amorphous gas beings who live in Santa Fe, anyway), new commercial kitchen cooperative The Kitchen Table has a super-dope dinner coming up Aug. 19 during Indian Market. Dubbed A Journey Through Indigenous Cuisine, visiting chef Brave Heart (Oglala Lakota) wants to take diners through “a culinary adventure that blends the rich heritage of pre-colonization Indigenous flavors with a contemporary twist.” We’re not sure what the menu entails, but we do know that there’s all this pre-colonial Indigenous cooking and food knowledge that’s really only gaining widespread attention in the last few years. The dinner’s kind of steep at $150, but sounds like the kind of thing that changes lives.

-Wildly excellent soup spot Soup Star has new summer hours: 10 am-6 pm Monday-Friday and 11-2 on Saturday. On Sunday, they rest. Know that. We love us some Soup Star, for what that’s worth, and we commend the renovations of its spot from the way Plant Base Café left it before moving out (wherein the food was so good and the ambiance was so terrible). In summation, you want to visit Soup Star. Tell them the Santa Fe Reporter sent you. You could tell them The Fork sent you, but we recently learned some people wish us dead!

-We’re loving the Santa Fe New Mexican’s Restaurant Bites section—it’s like they took our lives and put it right up there on the page—like if The Fork weren’t fun in any way. Hahahahaha! Nobody email us, we’re joking around here. Jeeze. It’s actually where we learned that the Legal Tender, which we’ve been telling y’all will reopen in Lamy outside Santa Fe soon in the hands of Café Fina’s Murphy O’Brien, has set an opening date of Aug. 11. Nobody wants to hear this, but we’re saying it anyway—we’ve watched that restaurant change hands roughly 8,000,000,000,000 times over the course of our life, and, well...we just wonder if there’s really the kind of demand for the place that it would need.

...because it has the word “brew” in it.

More Tidbits

-A class action lawsuit against fast food super-chain Taco Bell says that the company’s famous Crunchwrap doesn’t come with enough beef. At its core, this is one of those “photos in ads lied to us,” kind of things, but Ridgewood, New York resident Frank Siragusa apparently felt so burned by the beef oversight that he’s taking it to court.

-Weirdly, Taco Bell has already been getting into court stuff as of a little earlier in the month when it sued Wyoming-based taco joint Taco John’s, which somehow holds a trademark for the phrase “Taco Tuesday.” Seems Taco Bell feels the phrase “should be freely available to all who make, sell, eat and celebrate tacos.” In its petition, Taco Bell argued that Tuesday is a mediocre day that can be made more fun by engaging in Taco Tuesday. Now, we think it’s actually kind of cool of the company to try and free the phrase (that’s a good hashtag, probably), but Taco John recently filed an official response to the petition, which, in part, says that Taco Bell’s are, “statements of opinion to which no response is required, including that Tuesday is a mediocre day of the week.” This matter is ongoing, but we think everyone should know that we feel Taco John sounds like a shitty frat bro nickname that some preposterous Chad cooked up like an asshole.

-The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now say that roughly half a million Americans might be allergic to red meat, with many undiagnosed, and it all comes down to tick bites. See, if a lone star tick bites you, you can literally develop an allergy to meat known as Alpha-gal syndrome—and roughly 30- to 50% of people dealing with AGS must (or should) even avoid dairy in all of its forms. There’s more here from NPR.

-Jimmy Donaldson, aka Mr. Beast—being some kind of influencer/YouTube sensation (which is about the dumbest-ass thing you can be, we think)—is suing his food delivery service partner, Virtual Dining Concepts, claiming that their food was so shitty that it damaged his reputation. What reputation is that? Of a dude who does dumb shit on social media? Word, bro. The tale of Mr. Beast and food is actually an interesting one, and one that’s a mite too long to get into here without writing a bazillion words. Instead, we’re going to suggest you paste the following words exactly into Google to learn more: “Mr. Beast, Jimmy Donaldson, food, ghost kitchens, candy, YouTube, burgers.” God, we’re helpful.

-Speaking of influencers, noted vegan and raw food diet influencer Zhanna Samsonova died on July 21 during a tour of Southeast Asia of apparent starvation. She was 39. That’s far too young to die, so please hear our words: It is possible to go vegan and raw food, but it’s the kind of thing that will likely require help from people who’ve worked out how to do it. Please be careful if you do decide to go this route.

A Totally Scientific Breakdown of The Fork’s Correspondence

This week in the print edition of SFR, we sent intern Noah Hale out to try Frito pies, and he went kind of nuts across the city.

Number of Letters Received

20

*Why do you hate us so badly?

Most Helpful Tip of the Week (a barely edited letter from a reader)

“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

* No. No. No. No.

Actually Helpful Tip(s)

“This was your funniest column ever. Thanks for the late afternoon snort laugh.”

*Not really a tip, Jackie C., but keep telling us we’re pretty.

Soon-to-be-baked-again,

The Fork