Flour Bakery + Cafe

User Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This is one of my favorite bakery for fruit tart. I love their fruit tartelles. Even thought it is only in bite size, and costs $1.25 each. I still love them. They tastes delicious.

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User Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

You can't beat the food and service. I haven't found a hair yet but, if I did, I would just eat around it. It wouldn't bother me. Great place, I highly recommend. Hope to see you there soon.

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User Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Delicious food, friendly staff, tired interior: "Flour" is a wonderful South End bakery worth a bit of a trip. I now have been there many times and sampled most of the lunch fare, a good number of desserts and even a few of the dinner entrees. Among my favorite sandwiches is the smoked turkey sandwich with cheddar and cranberry chutney. Great flavor combinations on delicious focaccia bread. "Doe's Chocolate Macaroon" with a cup of dark roast coffee is quite a treat, as is the dacquoise and wondrously moist banana bread. But it is their seasonal surprises: heirloom tomato salad, berry and stone fruit pies, and summer gazpacho that really impresses. Prices are indeed steep, but lunch here is much tastier than the standard Au Bon Pain fare I face in my neighborhood. The staff is worth mentioning, always cheerful, well trained but unscripted and real, and calm even with a line out the door!

Now some peeves: Flour comes so very close to being equal to excellent bakey-cafes in Austria or France, but its physical appearance is not what it should, or easily could, be. The generous scaled windows are often quite dirty, the interior is painted a frosty and unhomey blue-gray (a tiny hint of green in it would warm it up). The furniture is okay, but just barely so. In true American fashion the glass doors and the windows near the door are plastered with notes and signs presenting a messy, visually noisy appearance. Recently some new color food photography appeared on the walls. While it is a nice concept, and the compositions are mostly good, the color balance is unpalatable in the extreme, recalling lurid 1950s era four color printing. In one picture a group of creme brullees have no caramelization and have an unsavory olive green cast. Yuck! And the pictures are shoddily mounted on way, way too thin Fome-Cor! Hint: get the colors fixed, inkjet print on canvas and have them mounted on a frame with a 2 inch profile. By now the owner, Joanne Chang, hopefully has made and put aside enough money to bring in a little professional design help. She has got a good 4 or 5 years out of the budget Ikea look, but like everyone's first post-college apartment, eventually it is time to buy adult quality furnishings. I wish Joanne would have a look at Barbara Lynch's restaurants. No need for lavish, but good design is not luxury, it is good business.

Final peeves: please prohibit cell phone use inside, and when I have come six miles for a nearly 20 dollar lunch (yes, that includes the yummy apple snacking cake), it is frustrating in the extreme to stand looking for a place to sit when as many as three tables are occupied by a single customer with a stack of medical or dental books and a cup of coffee that looks like it was last sipped three hours ago. Couldn't the fabulously friendly staff find a nice way of turning the tables so that a customer balancing a bowl of hot soup, large iced tea and dessert could please sit down?

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