Sarah Black, who runs the bread studio in Flowers & Bread, bakes bread. Credit: Courtesy of Emily Webber
A new cafe in the heart of Clintonville offers pastries and coffee along with an opportunity for learning.
Flowers & Bread at 3870 N. High St. joins the interests of foodies and florists alike in its remodeled white barn building that is home to a cafe, floral workshop and bread-baking kitchen. It hosts floral arrangement and bread-baking classes throughout the year.
“We believe that the simple pleasures in life are the ones that are most meaningful,” said co-owner Sarah Lagrotteria. “That’s why we decided to create a place for people to enjoy those.”
Lagrotteria teamed up with Tricia Wheeler, a 1993 OSU alumna and the owner of the Seasoned Farmhouse, a recreational cooking school in Columbus, to bring the idea to fruition. Both women have a culinary background, but also had an interest in floral arrangement that they hadn’t gotten to explore, Lagrotteria said.
“There is a synchronicity between flowers and baking,” Lagrotteria said. “Both involve selecting the most fresh ingredients to create the best composition.”
It took more than a year to remodel the space that Flowers & Bread now occupies, Lagrotteria said. The building has four separate areas: the cafe, the floral workshop, the bread studio and a private event space.
Lagrotteria said it’s important to her to keep things local. The cafe offers various pastries, sandwich and soup options that are all made with local ingredients. The coffee is also from a local vendor, Backroom Coffee Roasters. Local florists teach seasonal workshop classes on floral arrangements. The workshop also sells bouquets with flowers from local farms Thursday through Sunday.
In addition, Flowers & Bread has its own garden and hopes to start a compost program to have soil available for people in the community this summer.
Ohio State alumna Sam Arthurs, a barista in the cafe, will head up the compost program.
“This is an exciting atmosphere to work in,” Arthurs said. “They want us to learn new things every time we work, so I think helping with the compost program is a great opportunity for me to do so.”
Sarah Black, a baker from Ohio who spent 30 years working in the baking industry in New York, runs the bread studio that supplies bread for the cafe and hosts the baking classes.
Lagrotteria said Bread & Flowers bakes bread freshly day and night in order to keep up with the demand.
“The community has been so lovely and supportive in welcoming us to the neighborhood,” she said. “We want to be here for a long time; we want to look back and be a part of the fabric of the community. The heart of Flowers & Bread is to be an educational space, and the beauty of that is people are always teaching us new things, too.”
Flowers & Bread is located at 3870 N. High Street and is open from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
