What’s a 650-pound skirted robot named Dyanna doing standing near a café-bakery and a brewery? Hard to say, but the adventure of finding a courtyard with such oddities in Somerville was worth the Google map mess-up I endured to get there on this late-summer day. It’s close by but feels like another planet. And there are very good croissants.
Surprisingly, they’re actually previously frozen and then baked.
I love surprises. Told about Wildgrain Bakehouse, I didn’t get to venture there for a couple of weeks, and recently wandered (wonderingly) into the space next to Aeronaut Brewery not far from Union Square and gladly took in its offering, from a fresh-brewed drip coffee to a small crunchy pastry.
Open since March 5, this novel café-bakery fits well into the innovation-incubator of Somernova, off Properzi Way. Such spaces have a slightly industrial but mostly enigmatic appearance; what is going on inside the bland, often cement, exteriors? This café is a bit mysterious too, innovative and French in ways you wouldn’t suspect. What is a frozen Morello cherry-pistachio French tart or a raspberry-lychee ice cream sandwich doing in this slightly hipster, mostly undefined “neighborhood?”
That you can buy frozen food to bake at home is a novelty here, a surprising concept for a café, most of which sell goods ready-to-eat. You can also subscribe to frozen bread and croissants, delivered to your home. Jake Schaub, a manager, explained the operation. The bakery goods are supplied by a variety of artisan bakers, some small independent ones – the sourdough from the Slow Rise bakery in Concord – and at least one national, Bridor, supplying croissants. That too is novel, keeping such evanescent products from multiple suppliers moving.
The idea behind the provision of frozen goods is not just the extension of shelf life, according to Colin Spillane, head of retail operations. It is to offer a much better product, “dramatically better” he says, because you finish the baking “fresh at home.”
Here is the key then: the founders, Ismail Salhi and Johanna Hartzheim, now of Somerville, created Wildgrain in 2020 after spending about a decade in Paris. Americans may imagine that French people would never stoop to buying frozen food. We imagine they would see it as a work-around, an evasion of the duty to make food from scratch, made from ingredients hand-picked from a farmer’s produce cart or a street market’s seasonal offerings. But no, Parisians have found happiness in frozen products, high-quality ones, and there are chain frozen food shops such as Picard that belie the American image of frozen as second best or as time-saving convenience. The Wildgrain operation hopes to be image-changing. And I for sure will be back for the triple berry galette and the strawberry-rhubarb turnovers.
It’s the physical setting, the extraterrestrial feel of Wildgrain’s surround, that makes the experience of the coffee and baked goods pleasantly off-kilter and not at all Parisian. (The staff are friendly and voluble, and so not quite Parisian, either.) It is all welcoming.
Indoors is a large room, high-ceilinged, clean and light, with white-tiled walls, hanging plants and blond wood tables: the café opens you to possibilities as you sip your Speedwell coffee from its Plymouth roastery. Possibly you’d buy some croissant-shaped soap (!) or other interesting merchandise or handsomely packaged frozen foods from the glass-fronted freezer, or a loaf of French butter for that crusty bread?
Because the courtyard’s benches and tables also serve the neighboring brewery, depending on the time of day it may house beer tipplers as well as coffee sippers. The courtyard is not a particularly high-laptop-use sort of place, at least not during my visit. I saw a book or two being read, a young mother and friend gabbing around a bemused baby in a stroller, and a couple or two. The outdoors is perfect for a calm sit in the quiet just to admire the huge murals depicting palm trees and fanciful bright shapes, the planters on wheels, the signage. Though the scene is far in many senses from the Luxembourg or the Tuileries, a nibble of the fresh-baked frozen croissant might get you part way there. You might need to share with Dyanna, though.
Wildgrain, 29 Properzi Way, Ward 2, Somerville (7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday to Wednesday; 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday)
Corky White, a food anthropologist at Boston University, has lived in Cambridge since 1953 with long sojourns in Japan. She has written articles on coffee for Standart Magazine and books including “Cooking for Crowds” (in its 40th Anniversary edition) “Coffee Life in Japan” and, with her son, Ben Wurgaft, “Ways of Eating.” Corky is grounded in coffee and welcomes suggestions at cwhite@csindie.com.
