The line outside Tartine Bakery, March 2013.

The NYT gives it to you and streamlines the 38-pager in the book. Still, it is daunting and only for the ambitious. I just realized a couple of weeks ago that you can also buy the bread earlier in the day (at the bakery it is ready at 4:30 p.m.) at Bar Tartine on Valencia, which is open for lunch, Wednesdays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Somehow the Tartine bread is a story about how something can always be better or maybe now bread here has reached its end. With all of the amazing bread in the Bay Area – when I first moved here I think I ate mostly bread for the first year – it was hard then to think that someone else could come in and make an even better loaf. But Robertson did. Although looking at the recipe…well, wow. It wasn’t easy. Again, the recipe is here. 

Follow Us

I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

Leave a comment

Please keep your comments short and civil. Do not leave multiple comments under multiple names on one article. We will zap comments that fail to adhere to these short and easy-to-follow rules.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *