Atticus Cafe & Market Opens 2nd Location in New Haven: It's All About The Grains

Bite into a sourdough loaf from Atticus and you’ll taste the difference immediately. 

It's heartier and nuttier with an addictive chew and bolder character than most other breads, even from other artisan sourdough bakeries. The bakery’s pastries also have a wonderful and unique flavor. 

The bakery’s not-so-secret ingredient is simple: whole grains. 

“In 2020 we made the decision to stop using white flour, and lean entirely into regional grains instead of commodity grains,” says bakery manager Brian Lance. 

That means no more flour from wheat grown on giant farms in the country’s heartland and no more grain stripped of its nutrients and much of its flavor at massive mills. Instead Atticus gets its flour from New England and northeast farmers and millers whose products change depending on the season and weather patterns. 

“We don't just do this for the cool factor of it. We do it because it actually tastes great,” says owner, Charles Negaro Jr. “Some of the flours that we use you could eat raw.” 

I learn why Negaro and Lance are so excited about whole grains during a recent visit to Atticus Market in the East Rock neighborhood of New Haven. The store opened in March in the former Romeo & Cesare’s Gourmet Shoppe and offers a full assortment of high-quality grocery items as well as coffee, sandwiches and salads. An apple sourdough bread special is a showstopper, instead of sweet and cinnamon flavors, the approach is much more subtle with the apple coming across only sparingly. The must-try croissant is flakey and buttery with the whole grains adding depth, and the scones are equally appealing. The tofu banh mi is a vegetarian paradise of a sandwich served between two exquisite slices of sesame semolina. Other standouts include the morning buns, choco croissants and country sourdough. (A sourdough challah was added to the menu shortly after my visit and will be returning shortly to sample.) 

The new market is Atticus’ second location. It joins the Atticus Bookstore Cafe in downtown New Haven, which has been a bookstore since 1976 and a cafe since 1981. The location has been dabbling in artisan bread and pastries since 2016. 

While Lance heads up the bread program for both locations, Selene is the pastry chef and assistant manager. She says that when they eliminated white flour it took experimenting to figure out which type of flour worked best with each pastry. She settled on spelt flour for the cakes, spelt and rye flour for the cookies, high extraction flour for the croissants, and Appalachian white whole wheat flour for the scones. “Nowhere but here can you find the quality or the product line we have right now,” she says. 

It’s hard to argue with that.

Wheat grains have three primary parts: the bran, a nutrient-rich outer coating that has lots of fiber; the germ, which is the embryo of the wheat plant and provides flavor and aromatics to whole-wheat bread; and the endosperm, which provides nutrients to the germ and accounts for most of the grain’s mass. 

For most of human history, the various methods used to create flour still kept all three parts of the wheat grain together. Then roller mills were popularized in the late 1800s, and the process of making white flour became widespread. The new finer flour diminished the wheat grain’s endosperm and discarded the germ and bran. The resulting flour had less oils and therefore a far longer shelf life, and was easier to work with but it was stripped of much flavor and nutrients. The bread at Atticus, is something of a throwback to the pre-industrial breads of old. 

“Our primary bread flour is a sifted wheat, which means they take out 25 percent of the bran and germ, and the rest is still in there,” Lance says. “It's a little finer, not quite as dense as like a whole wheat would be, but it still retains bran and germ and it still retains that special flavor profile.” 

It’s fitting that Negaro’s business is helping to bring local bread making back to its roots as he is something of Connecticut bread royalty. His father Charles Negaro Sr. founded both Atticus and Chabaso, a commercial New Haven baker with more than 100 employees that provides ciabatta bread to restaurants and retailers throughout the Northeast, utilizing more than 25,000 pounds of wheat flour every day. Charles Jr. grew up with artisan bread and pastries made by Selene and other bakers employed by his father. However, over the years the company got away from that tradition. “You could have shown me a wheat head or a wheat berry, and I wouldn’t have known what it was. All we paid attention to was price and protein level,” wrote the younger Negaro in a statement posted to the company’s website in 2019. “In the summer of 2015, I read Amy Halloran’s book The New Bread Basket and went to the Grain Gathering at the Bread Lab. I realized we were messing up. We’d been on auto pilot and took a wrong turn and never realized it. The way we were using our buying power and our resources was broken.” 

Charles Jr. decided to use the Atticus bakery to explore the varietal grains bigger bread producers, including Chabaso, had moved away from. It started with whole grain scones offered at the bakery for the first time on Labor Day 2016 and from their built towards the elimination of all white flour products more recently. But the Atticus team is not solely focused on their own products. They’ve also made efforts to encourage more whole grain awareness in Connecticut. In October of 2019, they co-hosted the Northeast Grain Gab conference with the Yale Landscape Lab, an event that brought together farmers, brewers and bakers to discuss building and supporting local grain economies. That year the team also worked with a Connecticut farm to plant 15 acres of red spring wheat. “It was a full time job,” Charles Jr. says. “And really, the thing we learned from it was that there's not a lot of grain farmable land in Connecticut.” 

The only farm producing wheat on a large scale is Thrall Family Malt, which offers Connecticut-grown grain to breweries and distilleries. For more farms to start producing grain commercially, the state needs more infrastructure to support the industry Charls Jr. and Lance say. 

“To really get a local flour grain economy, someone needs to open a mill,” Charles Jr. says. “ That really is what has started the other local grain economies around the country.”

In the meantime, some great things with regional grains are already happening in Connecticut thanks to Atticus.  

NOTE: If you live in the area, don’t miss their weekly subscription based Bread Club.

Atticus Book Store Cafe 1082 Chapel St, New Haven @atticuscafe

Atticus Market 771 Orange St, New Haven @atticusmarket