Art-Is-In Bakery

The White Dynamite Baguette comes out of the oven with a crust that blisters and crackles and a crumb shot through with open holes — the kind of structure only long, slow natural leavening and a patient hand will build. It is the clearest read on what Art-Is-In Bakery actually does. The shop sits in Ottawa's City Centre, on the Wellington West edge of Hintonburg, and it presents as a bakery first: naturally leavened loaves and laminated pastry, not a café that happens to keep bread by the till. The name runs together into artisan, and the bakery treats that as a standard rather than a joke. A long, restless menu spins out from there, but bread is no accessory here — it is the idea the rest of the kitchen is built around.

The pastry case carries the bakery's sense of play. The O-Towner is the signature: a laminated doughnut-croissant hybrid, fried and sugared, its fillings rotating often enough that the bakery's most playful item never quite settles into place. The Sticky Bun is the order that needs no explanation — butter, lamination, and a counter that rewards arriving before the best trays are gone. Around them sit almond and butter croissants, espresso brownies, and raspberry-and-white-chocolate scones. The loaves hold their own beside the sweets: Kevin's White Sourdough, a buttermilk multiseed loaf heavy with sunflower, sesame, flax, and poppy, and Dynamite baguettes that reappear in a rosemary-and-roasted-garlic version.

What makes the menu cohere is that the bread keeps working after it leaves the proofing bench. The sandwiches are built on house Dynamite loaves — a Thai chicken sandwich layered with curry mayo, peanuts, and pickled green chillies; a crispy pickle melt on cheddar, chive, and jalapeño bread; a squash caponata with goat cheese and basil pesto. The sourdough pizzas push the same logic onto a sesame-crusted base: the Cheese Louise kept deliberately plain, the Great Mushroom built on cashew cheese and a garlic-basil miso pesto, the Tarte Flambée running crème fraîche, Gruyère, and hot honey. Open crumb, blistered crust, a long ferment — the dough that proofs for the baguette is the dough the sandwich loaves and pizza bases are cut from.

The brunch and comfort plates lean on the same foundation. Eggs Benny arrives on a house English muffin; the Croque Madame stacks Gruyère, béchamel, and a sunny egg on sourdough; the Sweet French Toast Stack is cut from house brioche under Chantilly cream and fruit compote. The burgers are bakery burgers — a Big K on house-ground top-sirloin and a soft potato bun, a hot-honey fried-chicken version on the same bun — and the pizza-night sharing plates open with Thai chicken wings brined, fried, and dressed in hot honey and crispy shallots. Even Kevin's clam chowder reads as kitchen cooking rather than counter filler.

Art-Is-In opened in 2011 and, by the bakery's own account, was built by Kevin and Stephanie Mathieson, Kevin's pastry training shaping the bread-and-pastry identity that still anchors it. It styles itself as an edgy gastro-bakery, half Paris boulangerie and half Brooklyn café, and it looks the part — industrial bones, an exposed and busy interior, a bustling counter rather than a hushed patisserie.

That breadth makes Art-Is-In useful in more than one register. The morning is a pastry-and-coffee run; midday turns to croques and the sandwich board, cut for a working lunch. Before a weekend, the take-home shop turns a visit into a pantry stop, with Kevin's White Sourdough, the multiseed loaf, and Dynamite baguettes reserved ahead rather than gambled on day-of. And three nights a week, Thursday through Saturday, the doors stay open late and the kitchen shifts into sourdough-pizza service — a Cheese Louise or a Sincerely Kevin coming out of the same oven that turned croissants that morning.