Otway Bakery

Milling and lamination out of a Clinton Hill kitchen

Otway Bakery opened in March 2022 as the bakery arm of Otway, the Clinton Hill restaurant and cafe that Samantha Safer runs in New York, after the restaurant's bread and pastry programmes outgrew the room they started in. Their first public form was Neighborhood Bread, a pandemic pop-up run out of Otway's basement, and the bakery kept that emphasis intact: milling, fermentation and shaping on the bread side, lamination on the other. Safer spends most mornings on pastry while the bread work sits with the head baker, and the case that results is split down the middle. Viennoiserie and rotating sweets on one side, sourdough and savoury loaves on the other, with the mill doing quiet work behind both.

Crullers, cardamom buns and Portuguese egg tarts

The counter is broader than a short list of signatures. Croissants, pain au chocolat and ham-and-cheese croissants anchor the laminated end, joined by cinnamon buns, pain au raisin pinwheels, Swedish cardamom buns and mushroom-filled savoury buns. Decorative citrus danishes and braided lemon poppy seed doughnuts carry the more ornamental work, and the cruller is the piece most people photograph. European viennoiserie sits next to Portuguese egg tarts, American coffee cake and yeast doughnuts, which makes the case read as a survey of forms rather than a single tradition faithfully kept. Sourdough and the other savoury breads run underneath all of it as the daily constant, and they are the reason the bakery exists in the first place.

Start with the cruller, leave with a loaf

The cruller is the obvious first move: it was singled out at the opening and it is still the most visually distinctive thing in the case. From there the croissant, the cardamom bun and the coffee cake map the sweeter side, while sourdough points back to the milling and bread work. The room is compact and built for standing, with blonde wood, potted plants on wooden shelves, Tartine cookbooks on the shelf, acoustic covers on the sound system and dogs working the floor for crumbs. There are a few high chairs and no real seating, so takeaway is the sensible default. Most of the pastry is gone by mid-morning on a weekend, which shapes the whole rhythm of the place: come early for the full case, come later and take what the day has left.