First Impression: Heritage Bakery & Cafe

Heritage Bakery & Cafe (4674 Cottage Grove Road, 608-222-0136) opened last week in the old Carl’s Cakes space, bringing a fresh mix of breakfast, lunch, and bakery treats to the neighborhood. This is a welcome addition to neighborhood highlights like Talula (802 Atlas Ave., 608-441-1977) or Papa Bear’s BBQ (4527 Cottage Grove Road, 608-222-2374), and a nice change from the pizza chains and Chinese restaurants that dot the strip. The A.V. Club stopped in to ogle fresh-baked pies, doughnuts, cakes, cinnamon rolls, Danishes, muffins, and quiches.

The space and service: Either pastry chef Denien Sramek or chef David Sramek, married co-owners and grads of The Culinary Institute Of America in New York, usually greets you at the counter. A grandmother, a baby, and little kids hang around and underscore the family business-nature of this start-up, and homey little touches like a wooden armoire bring cheer to this strip-mall space.

The A.V. Club’s food: A combo of baked goods and savory food makes a satisfying takeout meal for late mornings or early afternoons. The Lembas-like lemon pound cake is dense, crumbly, very rich, and ideal for a mid-morning tea service with a cup of piping hot Earl Grey.

A roast beef sandwich; the “Salami Stacker” on a ciabatta bun; and a brown sugar-encrusted, black-peppered bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich all looked good. But the house Heritage sandwich got the final nod based on the chicken, apple, and celery salad resting on stone-ground, mustard-slathered wheat bread, an enterprise improved by cranberries. Each sandwich comes with a choice of sides, the healthiest being a heaping salad of baby spinach broken up by big blocky croutons and drizzled with oil and garlic vinegar. This fed two adults.

And hey: the cookies. Giant peanut butter cookies were thick-as-a-brick slabs of crumbly dough speckled with sugar.

The verdict: Doughnuts, sticky buns, and croissants come in a higher price point than expected and could benefit from some competitive landscape analysis. But almost everything here is made from scratch, and we should support small, local businesses preparing real food whenever possible. And the sudden influx of Belgian waffles, biscuits and gravy, sourdough French toast, and quiche are pretty tough to argue with if you are a local.