Au Levain Bakery & Cafe

Lamination leads, pies and savoury bites follow

Laminated pastry is the discipline Au Levain organises itself around, and lamination is unforgiving: butter, dough, folds, cold time and a clean bake, with nowhere to hide if any of them slips. The bakery lists it first among what it makes, ahead of cakes, pies and savoury bites, and the menu is structured the same way, with cakes, pies and pastry together at the centre of a small café rather than at its edge.

English muffins are the item to know beyond the general categories, and they have done more than anything else to build the bakery's name in Chicago. The savoury side stays light: salads, sandwiches and savoury bites rather than a restaurant spread. The kitchen builds on high-quality ingredients and seasonal produce from local farmers, which is the frame to keep in mind when the case looks different from one month to the next.

A small room and a summer patio

Service is at the counter, indoor seating is limited, and a patio opens in summer. That shapes a visit more than anything else: this is a neighbourhood bakery-café where the case and a short café menu do the work, not an all-day dining room, and the compact scale is deliberate rather than a constraint being apologised for.

The tone is neighbourly. The bakery talks about being part of its neighbourhood and about meeting its neighbours, and the room behaves accordingly, with a chef's sign-off on the menu language and a scale small enough that the same faces come back weekly. In summer the patio changes the calculation and makes it worth staying with a coffee.

Start at the pastry case, take an English muffin home

Order a laminated pastry first. It is the fastest measure of the bakery, and it is what the whole operation is built to do well. A useful first pass is one laminated pastry, one thing from the cake and pie side, and one savoury bite or sandwich, which covers butter-driven technique, dessert work and the café menu in a single sitting.

Then take English muffins home. They are the clearest named specialty here and they sit oddly, and interestingly, beside the French technique everything else is built on. Pairing one with a laminated item gives a better read on the place than ordering only sweets or only lunch. Let the seasonal sourcing guide the rest, since what is in the case reflects what local farms have that month.