Bread Alone Bakery & Cafe

Devine Design Website for Bread Alone Bakery

Bread Alone Bakery and Cafe began with a simple loaf; handmade, organic and whole grain. They have since grown to include hearty boules, tasty paninis, rustic pastries, tarts & tortes. They also have 3 Hudson Valley cafés serving delicious, healthy meals, and their products are available at many regional grocers, Farmer’s Market and online.

Leaving New York City for the peace and serenity of the mountains is the dream of many people. Dan Leader and his young family moved to the Catskill Mountains in 1983 with the dream of building a wood-fired, brick oven bread bakery and establishing a healthy life. Inspired by the “back-to-the-land” movement and the writing of Helen and Scott Nearing’s “Living the Good Life,” Dan opened the bakery in the fall of 1983 with a custom built brick oven inspired by the ovens he had seen while working in French bakeries. Bread Alone opened with just five types of bread that Dan sold to the curious customers who stopped by the new bakery, and out of his station wagon parked just off the village center in nearby Woodstock. By 1985 a new oven was needed. The Parisian mason Andre LeFort travelled from Paris to create a unique oven, complete with iron cast from forges that Andre’s family has worked with for five generations. Andre and a crew of local builders spent the summer of 1985 building twin wood-fired brick ovens.

In 1993 Dan published his first book, “Bread Alone: Bold Fresh Loaves from Your Own Hands” which won the IACP Julia Child Award. This book introduced thousands of people to the simple joys of baking bread at home.

Bread Alone expanded in 1988 to include a café and a pastry room, and opened its Woodstock Cafe in 1994 and Rhinebeck cafe in 1998.

This site, done in Drupal, features an integrated ecommerce/shop, press/blog, menus and more.

The client does a great job with all of the updates and changes to text and images. But… if you look at this site …we warn you.. you’ll get very very hungry! The good news is that they ship everywhere! It also show how good photos ( in this case GREAT photos) make a huge, positive impact on a website. The bread, pastries, the cafés, the coffee, wood-burning ovens, Dan’s books are all amazing. So is Bread Alone’s lovely co-owner: baker, biker, fabulous human and our friend, Sharon Burns Leader.

Thanks to our associates Lydia Cheng & Associates, Linda Facci and Kyle Baker for their work on this site.