The team behind Mamani earned a Michelin star 48 days after opening. That’s not a typo. Forty-eight days. Brothers Brandon and Henry Cohanim built Feels Like Home Hospitality with a talent-scouting instinct that has been almost unsettling in its accuracy — they recruited Paris-born chef Christophe De Lellis, formerly of Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas, to run Mamani’s kitchen, and bar director Rubén Rolón, whose cocktail program at Bar Colette was nominated for Best New Bar by the James Beard Foundation.
When people who know Dallas dining tasted the bread service at Mamani — a rotating selection of freshly baked loaves served with Rodolphe Le Meunier butter flown in from France — the question wasn’t whether a bakery was coming. It was when.
The answer is March 9. The Bread Club opened at 2681 Howell Street in Uptown’s The Quad, right next door to Mamani, in a 2,600-square-foot space with 30 seats and a patio that was packed with people spilling onto the lawn within a week of opening.
The person the Cohanims brought in to run it is Peter Edris, and his background explains why this bakery is worth paying attention to. He grew up on a chicken farm in rural Pennsylvania, got a job at a French restaurant as a teenager, and spent the next two decades building one of the more serious bread résumés in the country — developing programs at Aureole in New York, then as head baker at Frenchette Bakery in Tribeca and at their second location inside the Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking District. He came to Dallas because the Cohanims offered him something most serious bakers never get: a stone mill.
The Bread Club is one of the only bakeries in North Texas milling its own flour in-house. Texas-grown grains — spelt, malted rye, buckwheat, heirloom wheats — go into the mill on-site and come out as the foundation for everything in the cases. The difference between flour milled that week and flour that shipped from a warehouse shows up in the crumb, in the crust, in the way the bread smells when you tear it open. Edris understands this at a molecular level, and the loaves at The Bread Club reflect it.
The bread program runs alongside laminated pastries, made-to-order sandwiches, grab-and-go salads, desserts, soft serve, matcha drinks, and coffee from a La Marzocco bar. The Breakfast Sandwich — spinach and chive egg, chipotle aioli, cheddar, avocado, and bacon on a house-made torta bun — has become the thing people order first and come back for. The Milanese loaf draws on Italian risotto flavors. The Piña Colada Matcha is exactly what it sounds like and works better than it should. The pastry cases run from croissants and kouign-amann to cookies, tarts, muffins, and a lemon meringue tart that several people have photographed before eating. The menu changes with what Edris is working on.
Christophe De Lellis is involved here too — the same Parisian culinary director who built Mamani’s kitchen is contributing to the bakery program, which is why the French baking tradition runs through everything even when the ingredients are Texan. They also supply the bread served at Mamani next door, which means when you taste the bread service at the restaurant, you’re tasting the same program.
The Bread Club is at 2681 Howell Street in Uptown Dallas, next door to Mamani at The Quad. Open daily. Follow @thebreadclub.dallas for hours and what’s in the cases each morning.
