Art-Is-In Bakery

The White Dynamite Baguette comes out of the oven with a crust that blisters and crackles and a crumb shot through with open holes — the kind of structure only long, slow natural leavening and a patient hand will build. It is the clearest read on what Art-Is-In Bakery actually does. The shop sits in Ottawa's City Centre, on the Wellington West edge of Hintonburg, and it presents as a bakery first: naturally leavened loaves and laminated pastry, not a café that happens to keep bread by the till. The name runs together into artisan, and the bakery treats that as a standard rather than a joke. A long, restless menu spins out from there, but bread is no accessory here — it is the idea the rest of the kitchen is built around.

The pastry case carries the bakery's sense of play. The O-Towner is the signature: a laminated doughnut-croissant hybrid, fried and sugared, its fillings rotating often enough that the bakery's most playful item never quite settles into place. The Sticky Bun is the order that needs no explanation — butter, lamination, and a counter that rewards arriving before the best trays are gone. Around them sit almond and butter croissants, espresso brownies, and raspberry-and-white-chocolate scones. The loaves hold their own beside the sweets: Kevin's White Sourdough, a buttermilk multiseed loaf heavy with sunflower, sesame, flax, and poppy, and Dynamite baguettes that reappear in a rosemary-and-roasted-garlic version.