High Street has, in the space of eight days, gone from having a perfectly adequate single bakery to having two competing artisan bakeries within sight of each other, a development locals describe as "genuinely stressful" and "honestly kind of exciting, but also stressful."
The first, Wheat & Co, opened Tuesday of last week with a menu leaning heavily into laminated pastry — a pistachio and burnt honey croissant, a rotating "danish of the week," and a sourdough scroll finished with a miso caramel glaze that has already developed its own queue-within-a-queue. Coffee is a single-origin Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, roasted locally, served with tasting notes on the cup ("stone fruit, jasmine, a little cheeky") that several customers have found "a lot for a Tuesday."
Four days later, and two doors down, Loaf Theory opened with a markedly different pitch: a more restrained, "old-world" approach built around a 36-hour fermented sourdough, a genuinely excellent plain croissant with no adornment whatsoever, and a filter coffee program using a Brazilian and Colombian blend described on the menu as "a coffee for people who just want a coffee."
"It's not that one's better," said one local, holding a coffee from each in either hand, having visited both "for research." "It's that they're doing completely different things and now I have to pick a whole personality."
The philosophical divide has, according to several residents, hardened quickly along predictable lines. Wheat & Co has attracted what one regular called "the people who photograph the pastry before eating it," drawn to the single-origin theatre and the willingness to put miso in a croissant. Loaf Theory has pulled in what another described as "the people who just want bread, correctly," suspicious of tasting notes and broadly of any coffee that requires a paragraph.
"I went to Wheat & Co first, out of proximity, and now I feel locked in," said one man, visibly uncomfortable with the admission. "If I'm seen at the other one, what does that even mean."
Both bakeries deny any awareness of, or rivalry with, the other. Staff at Wheat & Co described Loaf Theory as "doing their own thing, which is great," while staff at Loaf Theory offered an almost identical line about Wheat & Co, both statements delivered with the same carefully neutral tone.
Locals, for their part, have largely stopped pretending neutrality is an option.
"I've got a bakery now," one woman said, firmly, coffee in hand. "I didn't choose to have one. But I have one."