The Bay Area's Tartine Bakery Will Bring A Massive Food Hall To Downtown L.A.

When it comes to pastries, no name is as buzzy as San Francisco’s Tartine. In its nearly 15 years of existence, the bakery has won acclaim from food critics and casual snackers alike. SF Weekly said that, in a dire situation in which it was stranded on a desert island, it would pick the bakery's croque monsieur over water. And the New York Times proclaimed Tartine as their favorite bakery in the United States.

Now, Tartine is planning an expansion to Row DTLA near the Arts District (where else?). And this past week the architecture firm involved in the project released renderings of the upcoming project. The images depict a sleek, uncluttered space with a stainless steel kitchen, low-hanging lights, and hardwood floors. What the images don’t fully encapsulate, though, is the sheer size of the project.

Tartine, we should now mention, isn’t just opening a bakery; they’re ushering an entire food hall into a massive space that, according to Bloomberg, will include two stories and 38,500-square-feet in total. Dubbed the Tartine Manufactory, the project is a partnership between Chad Robertson and Elisabeth Prueitt (the bakery’s owners) and restauranteur Bill Chait, who was responsible for bringing you some under-the-radar joints like Bestia, Republique, and Otium (we kid). Also involved is Chris Bianco, who’s in charge of the famed Pizzeria Biano in Phoenix. The pizzeria, like Tartine, is the subject of much praise that verges on hyperbole (Eater dubbed Bianco as "America's best pizza maker," for instance). It was appropriate, then, that the planners told Bloomberg that the project would be an "ecosystem" in itself, and that it could be "a Disneyland for bakers and people who dig food."

According to Eater LA, the Manufactory is slated to include an on-site roastery that serves up cups of coffee, a 7,000-square-foot marketspace in which a number of artisanal producers will be plying their wares, as well as a 5,000-square-foot, yet-to-be-named restaurant that may model itself as a modern-day trattoria. Bianco will also be slinging his pizza on the sly. All this, amazingly, will be a side player to the main attraction, which are the croissants and other flaky goods proffered by Tartine.

As noted at LA Mag, much of the action will take place on the first floor, but there’ll also be a basement that houses several mills and a grain silo, so the planners are serious about the “in-house” tag. Tartine Manufactory is expected to open in October, though some portions, like the 5,000-square-foot restaurant, likely won't come to fruition until 2018.

We haven’t even touched on the stuff happening outside of the Manufactory. As you may have heard by now, Row DTLA has become a kind of vortex of gustatory experience. There’s the Smorgasburg outdoor market, which started this June. Upcoming stores include the second location of coffee-wonk Get Em’ Tiger, as well an outpost of Washington D.C.’s Rappahannock Oyster Bar.