It's easy to go over old ground with places that predate my existence here in Columbus such as Pattycake Bakery. Still, a brief history for those who aren't familiar or have forgotten how this quaint Clintonville bakery came into being might be helpful.
Established in 2003, this vegan bakery undertook the unique transformation to worker-owned co-op a decade later, adopting conscientious credos such as utilizing recyclable and biodegradable packaging, sourcing locally whenever possible, and using human power to deliver many of their goods via their bicycle-powered cart. While not an exact match, the bakery does remind me of one of my favorite places back in California in The Cheese Board Collective, another workers co-op which has spent more than 40 years selling cheese and, later, coffee, baked goods, and the pizza of the day (all veggie, with just enough made to sell out before the day's over) to hungry patrons in Berkeley.
I could say Pattycake has great pastries (and they do; more on that later), but it holds a little special place in my heart in that it helped ease the transition here to the Buckeye State. Ironically enough, it was another California transplant in Peet's Coffee (which had a brief and somewhat strange run here in Ohio, as I detailed in this blogpost) that set this up long before I had a notion that I would ever move to Ohio, much less heard of Pattycake itself.
Established in 2003, this vegan bakery undertook the unique transformation to worker-owned co-op a decade later, adopting conscientious credos such as utilizing recyclable and biodegradable packaging, sourcing locally whenever possible, and using human power to deliver many of their goods via their bicycle-powered cart. While not an exact match, the bakery does remind me of one of my favorite places back in California in The Cheese Board Collective, another workers co-op which has spent more than 40 years selling cheese and, later, coffee, baked goods, and the pizza of the day (all veggie, with just enough made to sell out before the day's over) to hungry patrons in Berkeley.
I could say Pattycake has great pastries (and they do; more on that later), but it holds a little special place in my heart in that it helped ease the transition here to the Buckeye State. Ironically enough, it was another California transplant in Peet's Coffee (which had a brief and somewhat strange run here in Ohio, as I detailed in this blogpost) that set this up long before I had a notion that I would ever move to Ohio, much less heard of Pattycake itself.
