Daly Bread greets you with it’s tongue in cheek religious motif before you even walk in the door. The sign in the front window welcomes customers with the slogan “Ask and ye shall receive….If we feel like it & aren’t sold out.” A large, laminated poster of “Buddy Christ”, a familiar figure to fans of Kevin Smith’s oeuvre (That’s right we put Kevin Smith and oeuvre in the same sentence. Deal with it.) acts as the daily special board. When asked why it isn’t a “Daly” special board the owner and head baker seems confused before shrugging and asking the following question. “Because that would be stupid?” She looks down brushing crumbs off of the counter while she continues to give me what I will quickly learn is the Daly Bread manifesto. “We’re all about snarky. We’ll take quirky if we have to but we don’t do cute.”
No. Daly Bread and it’s owner don’t do cute. What they do is bread, obviously, pastry, fresh pasta, coffee and, after four o’clock (because it’s five o’clock somewhere), cocktails. And they do them damn well.
Daly Bread began it’s trek to, what the owner calls, “semi-security” as a pipe dream. The kind millions have and few realize. Luckily, for the carb eating population, the owner hit the lottery. Seriously. You can’t make that kind of thing up. This afforded her the opportunity to attend Chicago’s illustrious “French Pastry School” and the ready cash to buy the building which now houses both Daly Bread and the owners apartment. It is, she says, a “bitchin’ commute.”
Daly Bread is best known for it’s Super Hero items. A selection of cakes, pies, cookies and other assorted pastry named after the owner’s friends or at least their super hero names. “What can I say? We’re all a bit demented but basically decent. Ya’ know, like super heroes.” The stars of this side of the menu are, without doubt, the Blonde Justice, a super moist key lime sour cream pound cake with a lemon glaze, and the Sister Scissor, an orange Madeleine, soaked in Grand Marnier and drizzled with dark chocolate. They are surprisingly simple and, at a range of $4 to $8 a pop, cheap. Which is part of the reason the owner says she got into the business.
“Look,” she begins, never taking her eyes off of the egg whites she is folding into the base of the potato and leak soufflé (a nod to her Irish roots, something she may make a daily special at some point and just a lark. She thought it might be fun to eat.) she’s experimenting with. “I come from a small town. It’s hard to find good bread outside of the city. Pastry? Deserts? Forget about it! Unless you’re willing to pay a million dollars a slice. So, I thought, why should the rich, who can afford to have their meals imported from Mars if they feel like it, be the only ones who can afford good food? Answer? No reason! Are we Food Lion cheap? No. Are we so expensive that you have to sell a kidney to get a wedding cake? No. Besides, it’s not like I’m using gold leaf or anything. Everything is basically a simple recipe jazzed up or not, depending.” She stops to pour the batter into ramekins. “Depending,” I ask, “on what?” She places the soufflés gently into the oven and turns to me brushing her bangs out of her eyes and laughing. “Whether or not I damn well feel like it!” Daly Bread. It ain’t cute but we guarantee you’ll be back.
