A Backdoor Bakery and Art's Café in Springville
During a global pandemic, technology can bring us together, in some ways. We can have Zoom happy hours, attend classes on Microsoft Teams and submit work over email. But as Steve Jobs famously said, “Technology alone is not enough.”
In Springville, the power of physical communion can be seen, heard, felt, smelled and tasted at the brilliant new Art’s Café. A bit of elbow grease and communal love have powered the café project through a gauntlet of challenges: funding issues, a massive construction phase and now a global pandemic. Just so the community can break bread together and express themselves—one day when this is all over.
“Because of COVID, we try to keep the number of people in the space to a minimum,” says Seth Wochensky, project leader and executive director at the Springville Center for the Arts. “It feels awkward: We’re always trying to stay away from each other. And that’s, like, the antithesis of the project. The whole point of the project is to bring people together, to decrease social distancing.”
The near-miraculous drive behind a multi-year effort to create a modest café might sound completely random, but the café is an outgrowth of the Springville Center for the Arts, which has enjoyed strong support for decades. “The organization has grown a lot and we have a long history of community support,” Wochensky explains. “That’s really been the foundation of the whole café project. We definitely wouldn’t be doing anything if it weren’t for that aspect of the project.”
In the fall of 2012, the arts center acquired the property and dilapidated building with a collapsed roof at 5 East Main St for the price of $1. Wochensky says his team had its work cut out for them.
“It was a massive challenge,” he admits. “We didn’t start from scratch. We started from a giant negative place. A hole in the ground would have been easier, but it wasn’t a hole in the ground. We had to spend a lot of money to get to a hole in the ground.”
To raise that money, the café project adopted a unique ownership model: Community members could buy ownership shares for a few hundred dollars apiece, similar to the way a co-operative grocery store has worker-owners. For their support, community members might receive anything from a dividend to access to exclusive bakery products, depending on their type of support.
The project moved forward in fits and starts. Construction was completed in late 2019. Then COVID hit. Slowly, as case numbers dropped in the late spring of 2020, work resumed on the project. The installation of the café’s 3,000-pound oven literally required all hands on deck, to physically move the behemoth into place.
In early October, the café was able to open as the Back Door Bakery, a takeout operation and first step toward a full-blown opening. Wochensky explains that a bakery pop-up hadn’t exactly been the full-blown grand opening he hoped would be a celebration of all who supported the project. However, the chance to sample baked goods from a café more than eight years in the making has been wildly popular.
Given the wait, simple, adequate baked goods would be more than enough. But the level of quality at Art’s Café far exceeds adequate. The flagship sourdough breads hold subtle yeast flavors and the kinds of crusty and soft textures that became synonymous with quarantine baking in 2020. The fresh-baked pretzels are crunchy, chewy and irresistibly salty. The gingerbread features a pleasantly sophisticated pop of citrus.
One early standout is the delicately flaky lemon rosemary shortbread cookies that come studded with sea salt. Flipping from sweet to savory as they crumble on the tongue, these cookies hit a level of quality that should be coming out of a James Beard Award–nominated kitchen, not a community bakery in Springville.
Ask bakers Allison Duwe or Carol Brucato about the food created at Art’s Café, and they’ll probably muse about trying to harness the power of farm-milled flour, or the magic of sourdough yeast. Foodie signposts may impress some of the customers who come through the door, but everyone behind the café admits it will win over new customers from Springville and the surrounding areas based more on flavor than principle.
“Taste triumphs everything,” Wochensky says. So yeah, the baked goods are among the best in Western New York and beyond, but the Back Door Bakery has provided something much more sacred during trying times: physical congregation.
“A lot of the time,” Wochensky says, “people are waiting in line outside because only so many people are allowed in at a time. It’s been really amazing to watch this little thing happen where, even though people can’t sit down and enjoy the space, there’s a mini outdoor café conversation happening. There’s a little bit of introduction going on and they’re kind of standing there waiting, and someone says, ‘I love coming here even though you can’t sit down. It gives you a chance to see people and have a few conversations.’”
In late March, the café was looking to expand its weekend-only takeout operation to include Thursday hours, along with the addition of sandwiches. Wochensky says his team plans to open the café’s front seating area for the Springville Art Crawl on June 5.
In addition to the beautiful aromas, satisfying baked goods and community bonding, this café is also driven by art, as the name indicates. The main floor features a stage and the basement has a community arts room replete with tables, art supplies and even dramatic lighting. On the roof, a modest garden is meant mostly to provide herbs for the kitchen—but the garden is also an homage to horticultural arts.
Whether it brings us together in wonder, amusement or horror, good art has a unifying effect, and throughout the COVID pandemic that sense of unity through art has been sorely lacking.
Apple founder Steve Jobs was right: Technology alone is not enough.
“It’s technology married with the liberal arts,” Jobs went on to say, “married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.”
