Razava Bread Co. Now Open In St. Paul

Almost 137 years ago, at the corner of Western and Carroll Avenues in St. Paul, Henry and Rebecca Baldinger started a bakery out of their home, and Baldinger Bakery stayed in the family until it was recently sold.

This week, the caretaker of the Baldinger Bakery legacy has opened the latest iteration of the family bakery business – 1.2 miles away from that first location.

Loaves of bread at Razava Bread Co. (Photo by Annalise Groff)

Founder Steve Baldinger and head baker Omri Zin-Tamir opened Razava Bread Co. at the corner of Grand Avenue and St. Albans in St. Paul, 685 Grand Ave. (open Wed.-Sat. 7 a.m.-3 p.m. and eventually expanding the hours). The bakery is working towards being certified kosher by Minnesota Kosher. Zin-Tamir closed his business, Bakery on 22nd St., to join Baldinger’s venture.

“I’ve had this concept in my head for 10 years, at least, since we stopped doing bread at the big bakery,” Baldinger said. He explained that at the Baldinger Bakery facility on Phelan Avenue which they built in 2012, they had stopped producing artisan breads for restaurants. “From that point, I wanted to get back in, but I wanted to do it right. I wanted to do it in a different way.”

Zin-Tamir had been doing artisan breads out of the basement of his home in Minneapolis. He had built everything from scratch in the open space that he would need to make the sourdough and long-fermenting, high-hydration loaves of bread that he had become known for.

“Steve walked in at a moment where I was already feeling like I was growing out of that basement,” he said. “I was selling out [at the Mill City Farmer’s Market] in an hour and a half. I wasn’t able to meet the capacity. I had more subscribers than I could provide bread for. And at the same time, I couldn’t afford to hire anyone.”

Baldinger had been working with a restaurant consultant to help to find the right partner.

“I knew I needed someone to work with me on it; I wasn’t signing up to bake,” Baldinger said. “So she gave me a call one day and she goes, ‘I’m at a farmer’s market. I think there’s someone down here you really need to meet.’”

Baldinger met with Zin-Tamir, described his vision for the cafe, and learned where the baker was in his trajectory.

“The more he talked, the more I talked, it just seemed like it would be something that might be really interesting to try and put together,” Baldinger said. “The more we talked about our stories, the more things overlap. And the vision about being good bread on a larger scale in a comfortable place, something we both wanted.”

Alex Baldinger, Steve’s cousin and Razava’s chief of staff, said finding Zin-Tamir was the missing piece.

Pita bread in the oven at Razava Bread Co. (Photo by Annalise Groff)

“We come from a baking family, but none of us are actually trained bakers,” he said. “Once we found Omri and tasted his bread, that was the key to making the vision turn into something real.”

Baldinger’s concept was right in Zin-Tamir’s wheelhouse: sourdough, long-ferment bread with a menu that complimented the bread.

“Interesting spreads and dishes that you’re not getting someplace else,” Baldinger explained. “And this bread you won’t see other places. We’re going to try stay on brand.”

Zin-Tamir working in a big, bright, bustling kitchen is a transition from being a solo practitioner in a basement.

“Yeah, it’s different [but] I’m happy as hell to be doing this because of the scope of the people we can reach and because of how far we can extend the product in the market,” he said. “That’s the motivation, and that’s a big excitement. The nuances of this space versus the basement is what it is. Like everything else in life, it takes some getting used to.”

Omri Zin-Tamir in his basement bakehouse, which will be used for Razava Bread Co. research and development. (Courtesy Razava Bread Co.).

Building a menu

Also different for Zin-Tamir is the menu beyond the loaf of bread. At the Bakery on 22nd Street, he was baking loaves of bread for subscribers or to sell at the farmer’s market. Now, the breads are part of an evolving menu which he said was a team effort in creating.

“We’re going to be serving some really good bread-forward dishes that elevate this idea that bread is not just a vessel; it’s an ingredient,” Zin-Tamir said. “It has to match what you put on it. It can just be the vessel, but it absolutely doesn’t have to be. And it serves the bread and the eater if it’s not.”

Alex Baldinger said they leaned into Zin-Tamir’s roots with a Middle Eastern/Mediterranean menu.

“Both as a consumer of food and also just a lover of different parts of the world, that has always been near and dear to my heart,” he said. “So it gave us a lot of room to execute in terms of how can we service the bread here.

“Not only can you do a nice open-face toast with preserved fish, or smoked salmon on a bagel, which is kind of elemental to what a bakery should offer. But you can also do things like serve the shakshuka with really amazing pita bread, and it all kind of fits the same plan.”

Toasted sourdough with ricotta, smoked mackerel and pickled relish at Razava Bread Co. (Lonny Goldsmth/TC Jewfolk).

The preserved fish dish he mentioned is a smoked mackerel on a piece of sourdough with a ricotta spread and topped with pickled relish. The fish is sourced from Fish Wife, which is based in California, and Alex Baldinger said the product is perfect for what they are trying to do with breads.

“We talked about what is best-in-class taste like in sourdough, and I would say that they’re doing best-in-class in tinned fish,” he said. “Once we tasted that product, we were like ‘We’ve got to find a way to put this on the menu.’ And when I tasted what they had come up with…I never thought of smoked mackerel as being something that I needed, but now I need to have another one of those.”

Alex Baldinger, who lives in Toronto had previously been in journalism as a food writer and editor, so he’s seen plenty of menus, and has a sense of what works and doesn’t work.

“We wanted was something that’s cohesive. You don’t want to be cherry-picking just for the sake of what’s going to be popular, what’s going to sell,” he said. “You want people to kind of feel that you’re sort of centered around a list of ingredients. We have so many wonderful culinary influences that we can draw from.

The breads available are listed on the website. In addition to San Francisco Sourdough, there is a Miche, a 4-pound French country bread, as well as New York and Jerusalem bagels.

“The man sees things in bread and in his process that others don’t see,” Alex Baldinger said of Zin-Tamir. “The genius of him is that he’s a singular entity; a talented, visionary baker. We just want to give that as much support and runway and platform as we can.”

An Americano at Razava Bread Co. made with Slow Burn Coffee beans. (Lonny Goldsmith/TC Jewfolk)

The coffee served up is sourced locally from SK Coffee, and Albuquerque, N.M.-based Slow Burn Coffee Company. A previous iteration of Slow Burn had been owned by Loren Bunjes, Razava’s general manager.

Bunjes and Zin-Tamir have worked closely to build the team in both the front and back of the house. A couple of weeks before opening, Bunjes moved between working with a group of team members at a long table in the cafe and showing new staff the coffee bar setup, while Zin-Tamir worked in the kitchen with the rest of the team on the menu.

“This is people-driven,” Zin-Tamir said. “You’re only as good as the people you hire and the people who stay with you and the people who understand your vision and want to execute it the best way, and see the merits in that, and – basically – buy into it. If you have people who don’t connect with what you’re doing, we’re definitely better off not having them on the team.”

Zin-Tamir said the turnout for interviews was strong, allowing them to be selective in their hiring choices.

“The main criteria was ‘do you understand what we’re trying to do? Do you feel passionate about this?’ Everything else is teachable,” he said. “We work hard, especially Loren and I, to build a team of people that we really trust, that understand our vision and our mission. We’re only as good as that. We’re only ever as good as that.”

Said Alex Baldinger: “We’re going to go out of our way to make the guest feel cared for. It’s our way of making people feel like it’s an extension of their home. That’s part of the ethos and culture.”

Purposeful locale, name

The location – being close to where his great-grandparents started the business in 1888 – which is inlaid in tiles at the front door – was key for Baldinger.

American Jewish World ad for ‘Razava Health Bread’ on the top left of the page, from March 24, 1922. (Upper Midwest Jewish Archive).

“It’s really a merging of our historical roots in St. Paul and being in the business, and creating something that’s unique and different for today,” Baldinger said. “It’s really been an interesting tale, as we’ve weaved our tales of baking back and where the name Razava comes from is really the link between his family and the way he bakes bread, and where we started.”

Alex Baldinger didn’t grow up in St. Paul – he said his father was the only one of the Baldinger clan that left St. Paul. But he grew up hearing the stories of the neighborhood where they are setting up shop.

“I grew up hearing so much about St. Paul, Grand Avenue, Selby and Dale, and all these streets and all these products, Razava being no. 1 among them,” he said. “I’m walking down the streets and seeing ‘Oh, that’s where that is.’ It’s very gratifying to be able to play a part in the family story and the family legacy. And just the fact that it is so close together physically is remarkable.”

The name Razava has been part of Baldinger family lore since 1910. Baldinger said the recipe is a patented loaf that his great-grandfather sold locally and regionally until about 1940.

“it was basically promoted as a health bread…you think of a high-fiber [bread], which is kind of what it was,” Baldinger said. The original recipe was a rye bread made from 100% rye midlands, which is the middle part of the grain. “In the late 1800s, that extraction made a certain kind of bread that people knew intuitively made you feel better.

“But we didn’t know what razava the word meant. We knew what it was. We knew what the patent was, but no one could remember what razava meant.”

In a shocking twist to Baldinger, Israel-born Zin-Tamir helped. Zin-Tamir’s grandmother is from the same region of Poland that Baldinger’s great-grandmother came from, Galicia.

“He asked his grandmother [this past] summer if she knew what Razava was and she said ‘It doesn’t mean anything to me,’” Baldinger said. “Then he asked her in Polish and she said ‘Yeah it’s the special bread.’”

Baldinger said that he found a memoir of someone who came to the United States in the 1850s and wrote about a mill he owned that made “razava flour.”

“He was talking wheat, and we did it in rye, right but it is exactly the same,“ he said. “‘Makes you strong like a horse’ was their advertisement back then. That was the cementing of the tie.”

Said Alex Baldinger: “We’ve all been working so hard to get to this point. Now the real work is baking the bread and becoming the pillar that we hope to be in the Twin Cities bread community, and Grand Avenue/St. Paul community overall, and living up to the ideals of what we want to be, which is first and foremost, the place to get an amazing loaf of bread, a great cup of coffee, and and a great experience.”

The front entry at Razava Bread Co. (Lonny Goldsmith/TC Jewfolk).