Della Fattoria Downtown Café

Bread from a ranch oven, sold downtown

The loaves came first, and they came from a ranch. Kathleen Weber started baking on the family property outside Petaluma in the early 1990s after reading Carol Field’s The Italian Baker, and for her fiftieth birthday her family built her a small wood-fired oven to an Alan Scott design. She baked for family and friends, then for fourteen weekly customers, and by 1995 her bread had reached Thomas Keller’s kitchen at The French Laundry. Everything that followed rests on that method: natural starters, long fermentation and a wood-fired oven, and Della Fattoria has kept to it since. Della Fattoria Downtown Café opened in 2003, when the Webers took a historic brick building in the town centre and turned a ranch bread operation into a public counter.

A bakery case that becomes breakfast and lunch

The café is the public face of the family bakery, still run under Weber stewardship, and it is broader than a bread shop. A bakery case sits alongside breakfast, brunch and lunch service, with seasonal cooking built around the same loaves: salads dressed with house croutons, poached eggs served over bread, sandwiches on levain. Rustic loaves and natural fermentation remain the spine of it, with Sonoma produce doing the seasonal work. Demand grew early through local wholesale accounts, including the Sonoma Mission Inn, which pushed the family toward professional equipment. After a pandemic closure the café came back as a downtown gathering place, with a parklet out front and a room that turns lively and loud when it fills.

Order the Tuna Piadina, then work the case

The staff favorite is the Tuna Piadina, a tuna melt built on pan-fried pizza dough with cheddar, peperoncino, arugula and citronette, and it shows how the kitchen uses its own baking as structure. The same logic runs through the rest: a chicken salad sandwich on levain with red onion confit, celery, aioli, toasted almonds, mixed greens and citronette; a Breakfast Bunwich of poached egg, cheddar, Caggiano ham and aioli on a house burger bun; chilaquiles with eggs, tortilla chips, black bean puree, avocado, pickled red onions, rotating salsa, queso fresco and cilantro. The bakery case runs to croissants, chocolate croissants, bear claws with almond paste, blueberry cloud brioche donuts, monkey bread and scones. Drinks stay simple, with a honey lavender latte and a house-made chai latte alongside the espresso.