Babettes: Artisan Without Pretension
19 Mar 2020
Babettes specializes in house-made baked goods, pizza and small plates.
By Kate Jonuska Photos by AliveStudios.com For its first five years, Babettes was a tiny operation that made huge waves. Bon Appétit singled out their pastry as one of the magazine’s “Best Food We Ate This Year” in 2015, and Thrillist rated Babettes as one of the 21 best bakeries in America. Big achievements for an operation with mostly two employees: its co-owners Catherine and Steve Scott, baking and selling out of The Source Hotel and Market Hall in Denver.
The bakery boasts several varieties of Steve’s famous bread. As a baker, he’s passionate about perfecting fermentation, pushing hydration and creating caramelized crusts thick with flavor. Babettes’ pastries and the ever-popular chocolate cakes bring in repeat customers from Denver, Boulder and beyond.
The restaurant’s centerpiece is a beautiful, butcher-block community table on which Steve once shaped bread for many years at a past job, and a gorgeous wood-fired pizza oven heats the entire area. The space is not only welcoming but symbolic.
“This table has seen hundreds of thousands of loaves of bread shaped on it, and I thought it would be a really cool addition to what we’re doing here,” says Steve, who explains the name Babettes has always conjured his perfect café environment. “We’re about fresh cooking, country cooking and cooking for all the right reasons. We try to be unpretentious. Just come in, leave the cooking to us and have a nice time.”
The Scotts are certainly having as much fun crafting the menu of their pizzeria as they did in the early years of the bakery. Fermented to perfection, the dough is paramount and is the backbone of Babettes’ roster of classic pizzas, including both red and white pies as well as a daily special.
Most exciting, though, are the small plates, which are an ever-changing selection of inspired dishes — sometimes protein-centered, but more often highlighting fresh vegetables from nearby Boulder County suppliers like Oxford Gardens, Ollin Farms and Kingdom Come Mushrooms.
“We’re definitely moving more in a vegetable-driven direction with the small plates, following our inspiration, which keeps us very excited,” says Steve, who documents these daily specials on Babettes’ Instagram account (@babettesartisan) and on their website. Recent favorites have included duck confit with puttanesca, roast artichoke with smoked burrata, and radicchio with andouille vinaigrette.
“I love that we can sit and eat dinner here, that it’s healthy and wholesome and different every day. I love seeing all the new ideas he’s coming up with,” says Catherine. “And being able to mingle with people in the restaurant — that’s been great. It’s a whole new relationship with our customers, and that’s what we love about this business.”
Babettes Pizza & Pane 2030 Ionosphere St., Suite G, Longmont 720-204-7420 www.babettesbakery.com Bakery hours Tues. 7 a.m.–6 p.m. Wed.–Sun. 7 a.m.–9 p.m. Pizza parlor hours Wed.–Fri. 3–9 p.m. Sat.–Sun. 11 a.m.–9 p.m. Happy hour Wed.–Fri. 3–5 p.m.
