Levain & Cherry

Levain and Moulin Viron flour do the work

Most of what comes out of the ovens at Levain & Cherry is built on levain rather than on commercial yeast, and the flour is French: organic, milled by Moulin Viron, a family mill just outside Paris. That pairing is the premise of the whole bakery. It started as bread and baguette deliveries run out of a home kitchen, opened its first Birmingham shop in Kings Heath in August 2020, and grew from there into a two-site operation with a second counter in Stirchley. Its founder grew up in France and came to baking from a professional kitchen, self-taught at the bench, which shows in a range that treats French method as a base rather than as a rulebook.

A working bakery you can watch

The Kings Heath shop is small and the production is not hidden behind a wall. Bread is made in view, from the first mix through to the finished loaf, and the smell of it carries out into the street. That gives the room the character of a workshop with a counter attached rather than a retail unit with a bake-off oven at the back. The scale keeps the range short and the turnover high, so the case reads differently at nine in the morning than it does later on. British Baker placed Levain & Cherry seventh in its 2025 Bakers' Dozen list of artisan bakeries, and the bakery appears in The Good Food Guide's 2026 Britain's Best Bakeries.

Order a loaf, a croissant and something filled

The strongest order is a set of three: one sourdough loaf or baguette for the levain work, one croissant for the lamination, and one filled item for the side of the bakery that improvises. Among the pastries, look for the white chocolate and pistachio pain au chocolat. Specials have run to nduja, goats cheese and walnut focaccia, a croque croissant with red Leicester and pesto, a peanut butter and passion fruit chocolate cookie, and a rhubarb custard and chocolate brioche. Pillowy focaccia and brioche hold the middle of the counter. Those combinations are the clearest sign of how the bakery works: classical French technique used as a starting point for flavours that have nothing classical about them, with the range shifting often enough that the case is worth reading before you decide.