Big Bakery News

Guatemalan bakery-cafe opens first U.S. outpost in Uptown Dallas

Bread is the foundation.

Photo courtesy of San Martin

A bakery and restaurant chain from Guatemala is making its entry into the United States market, with a first location set to open in Dallas in 2018.

Called San Martín Bakery, the bakery-restaurant will open its first location outside of Central America in Dallas' trendy Uptown neighborhood, where it will offer European-styled baked goods including sourdough breads, croissants, and other puff pastries, along with a cozy cafe open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Manager Gabriel Castillo says they're aiming to open by mid- to late-summer.

San Martin Bakery was founded in 1974, and operates nearly 40 locations across Guatemala and El Salvador. Although they are a chain, they pride themselves on keeping each location unique.

Their menu includes burgers, sandwiches, wraps, and pastas. There is soup served in a round boule loaf; salads; queso; sandwiches on ciabatta bread, and sub sandwiches on long baguettes. There are rustic pizzas, baked in a stone oven.

"We have some things that will be new to the U.S.," Castillo says. "We do croissants filled with Nutella, we do a salty beef-filled croissant, we do croissants with chicken, different empanadas, and a pastry filled with guyabana and cream cheese."

Their bread situation is serious.

"The restaurant specializes in rustic pizza since we are bread makers, that's how we grew," he says. "Our breads are amazing, the crust and the dough are different from most of what you find in Dallas. We use a starter and ferment our dough for 48 hours. We observe European standards that we apply to our Latin cuisine."

There is also breakfast, and that means breakfast quesadillas, pupusas topped with sunny-side eggs, chilaquiles, eggs with fried plantains, benedicts, omelets, pancakes topped with Nutella, oatmeal, and French toast. The breakfast menu looks divine.

There's also beer, wine, and sangria, and smoothies made with yogurt.

The Dallas location will open at 3120 McKinney Ave., an address that was previously home to the McKinney Avenue Contemporary gallery, which departed Uptown in 2015. San Martin rebuilt from the ground up, a process beset by delays in design and construction, but one that the owners were determined to get right.

"We had many challenges in the build-out, but we focused on the end goal, which was that this had to be a perfect introduction of our concept in the United States," Castillo says.

The location will be 8,000 square feet, and will feature a San Martin trademark: a "live garden," AKA a lush wall covered with plants.

Castillo's brother attended Southern Methodist University which is what first put Dallas on their radar. But they soon saw that the city had other strengths as the location of their first foray into America.

"The people in Dallas are friendly and open to new things," Castillo says. "The city is also familiar with Latin American food in a way that other cities are not. And it's well known as a place where people dine out."

Given the dominant role that Guatemala plays as a major coffee grower, they are rightfully proud of their coffee.

"Guatemala has the best coffee in the world, and we work directly with farmers and roast our own beans," Castillo says. "We're changing the way farmers live. They used to export all of their coffee around the world. But we set up our roaster in Guatemala and started buying coffee and helped change the culture of coffee there. People who live in Guatemala can now enjoy the best coffees of Guatemala in our stores, and that used to be unheard of."

openings uptown

Convention News

Reducetarian Summit had to be unlikeliest convention in Dallas ever

Reducetarian Summit

Dallas likes to promote itself as a great place to host conventions, but one of the most unpredictable would have to be the Reducetarian Summit, which took place at the end of October at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Dallas, where 500 people from around the world met to brainstorm on ways to reduce consumption of animal products.

Unpredictable because Dallas' favorite cuisine is the steakhouse, and Texas is famous for its consumption and production of meat, including being the top beef producer in the U.S. Yee-haw meat, and all that.

So, not the friendliest setting for an event that advocates cutting back on meat — but that was the point, said Reducetarian founder Brian Kateman.

"We could go to New York or Los Angeles, and draw a bigger crowd, and we have done that," Kateman said. "But we want to go to the places where these ideas are not yet as popular."

Kateman founded the organization in 2015 with a goal to reduce consumption of red meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, and dairy. The key word is "reduce," and it's a controversial stance for vegans who abstain from animals entirely — some of whom protest the concessions that the Reducetarian stance allows.

The Reducetarian outlook is pragmatic, with an awareness that an all-or-nothing approach can be intimidating. Kateman's theory, which he also published in a book called The Reducetarian Solution, is that a more flexible attitude that encourages "less" rather than "none" has the potential to win over more converts.

In his keynote speech, he emphasized four major points:

Getting a lot of people to reduce consumption has a bigger impact than getting a small number of people to swear off entirely.
It's about incremental change. The idea is to "celebrate and not berate".
All motivations matter — whether you're trying to stop cruelty or get healthier or save the environment, they're all equally good reasons.
The Reducetarian movement works to be an umbrella to all efforts: vegetarianism, veganism, pescetarianism, flexitarianism.

The three-day conference included panels, lightning talks, workshops, and fireside chats, with tech entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, journalists, environmentalists, animal advocates, nutritionists, academics, students, and non-profits, with nearly 100 speakers, panelists, and exhibitors.

That included a number of Texans such as Troy Gardner, owner of TLC Cafe in Richardson, Brandon Waller of Bam's Vegan, and Brett Christoffel from All Y'All's Foods, maker of It's Jerky Y'all vegan jerky, plus professors from TCU, University of Texas, and even Texas A&M.

Topics included buzzy concepts such as "blended meat," the practice of combining meat with other ingredients to use less meat, such as a burger made with ground beef and diced mushroom. There were talks on how factory farming affects workers and communities, documented so effectively in the 2022 filmThe Smell of Money, and a panel called "Waste Not, Want Not: How to Decrease Animal Products That Aren't Even Eaten" (leather etc.).

One of the best parts of the event was the emphasis on networking, with different techniques to help people connect including creating makeship groups of 10 people, who would introduce themselves and share their reason for attending. It gently "forced" everyone to interact, resulting in a sense of community that was a valuable takeaway. I may have only exchanged a sentence or two with Nitish Pahwa, writer from Slate, or Cameron Harsh, director of programs at World Animal Protection, but I feel like I know them now.

Last but not least was the food, with an expo showcasing plant-based, fermented, and cell-cultured food and related services.

This was the 10th anniversary of the event, and Kateman said that even as someone who'd been involved from the beginning, there were always new things.

"I think the point of the summit is that there is probably the opportunity to learn something you don't already know," he said.

sustainability vegan