Empire Baking Company started with a complaint. Meaders Ozarow and her husband, Robert, couldn’t find a real bakery in Dallas in the early 1990s, the kind that made bread the slow way instead of trucking it in from somewhere else, so in 1992 they opened one themselves in a small shop on Oak Lawn Avenue. Their own motto still sums up the founding logic better than anything a marketing team could write: we couldn’t find an artisan bakery, so we started one. More than thirty years later, it’s Dallas’s longest-running craft bakery, and neither Meaders nor Robert ever learned to bake a single loaf themselves. What they understood instead was how to find the right people and get out of their way.
That person, for most of the bakery’s history, has been Chris Cutshall, who came on early and has spent decades running the ovens. He’s described loading baguettes into the oven with a longtime colleague as something close to a dance, the kind of motion that stops being conscious after enough repetition and starts feeling more like meditation. That’s not a small detail. Empire’s dough is too sticky to run through a machine, so almost everything is still shaped and handled by hand, using less yeast than most commercial bakeries, which slows the whole process down on purpose. The bakery keeps five separate sourdough starters alive and fed every single day, each one contributing a slightly different character to what comes out of the oven.
The original Oak Lawn shop is long gone. Empire operates today out of three locations, in Inwood Village, near SMU, and in West Village, alongside a wholesale operation that supplies bread to a long list of the city’s better restaurants, Al Biernat’s and Le Bilboquet among them. The ingredients haven’t gotten cheaper as the bakery has grown. King Arthur flour, natural sea salt, Plugra butter, and Callebaut chocolate all show up in the recipes, the kind of inputs that cost more and don’t cut corners.
A few items on the menu carry their own small histories worth knowing before you order. The baguette is the obvious anchor, a shape and method that goes back to French bakers standardizing long, thin loaves in the early 1900s so they’d bake faster and could be torn apart without a knife, and Empire’s version leans into that old logic with a genuinely shattering crust. The sourdough owes its tang to wild yeast fermentation, a technique that predates commercial yeast by thousands of years and that Empire keeps alive daily through those five starters rather than relying on a manufactured strain. The croissant traces back to Austria before France ever claimed it, evolving from the kipferl into the laminated, all-butter pastry the French perfected, and Empire still folds theirs by hand rather than running them through a sheeter, which is part of why the layers hold up.
Then there’s Hippie Health, a whole wheat loaf built with flax and sunflower seeds, wearing a name that’s a direct wink at the health food movement of the 1970s, when whole grains and seeded breads first became a countercultural statement rather than a mainstream grocery item. It’s the kind of name a bakery only gets to use once it’s been around long enough to earn the nostalgia. The Paisano Loaf, a rustic crusty round, and the Pecan Wheel, a spiral pastry that leans into Texas’s own pecan tradition, round out the list of things regulars ask for by name rather than by category.
The vibe changes a little by location, which makes sense given how differently each neighborhood uses the space. West Village runs busier and faster, full of foot traffic grabbing a sandwich or a loaf on the way to somewhere else, the grab-and-go case doing a lot of the work. The Inwood Village location keeps more of the original neighborhood bakery feel, a smaller footprint where regulars tend to know the staff by name. What holds all three together is the smell that hits before anything else, yeast and butter and the specific scent of bread actually baking on site rather than being reheated, which is rarer in Dallas than it should be.
A handful of items have earned near-mythical status among regulars, the things people specifically drive across town for rather than pick up on a whim. The Sourdough Round consistently ranks as the top seller across all three locations, dense enough to hold up under a heavy sandwich but still light inside, with that characteristic tang from the daily-fed starters. The almond croissant shows up in review after review as the pastry people can’t stop thinking about, laminated the traditional way and filled with almond cream rather than the shortcut paste some bakeries lean on.
Empire also joined the spiral croissant trend that spread out of a New York bakery a few years back, twisting the traditional lamination into a coiled shape that bakes up with more exposed layers and a shattering, caramelized exterior. It sells out early on the days it’s offered. The Pecan Wheel and the chocolate zucchini slice both draw the kind of loyal following that has customers asking staff to set one aside before it disappears from the case.
The sandwiches deserve their own mention, since Empire treats them less like an afterthought to the bread program and more like a second reason to walk in the door. Everything is built fresh each morning in quantities meant to run out, not sit under heat lamps waiting for the next order. The Smoked Turkey on Whole Wheat Farm Bread is the bakery’s best-selling sandwich and about as straightforward as the menu gets, which is exactly the point. The Chicken Salad on Walnut Scallion Bread pairs a classic filling with a bread that’s nutty enough to hold its own against it. Pimento Cheese on Hippie Health takes a Southern staple and sets it against a seeded whole wheat loaf instead of white bread, and the contrast works better than it has any right to.
The Ham on Baguette stays close to a proper French jambon-beurre, simple, buttered, and reliant entirely on the quality of the bread underneath it. A newer addition, the Pastrami Pimento Sandwich, has already built its own following by pairing the tang of house pimento cheese with smoked pastrami, a combination that shouldn’t work on paper and somehow does. Every sandwich comes down to the same principle that runs through the whole bakery: nothing gets good enough to sell without starting from bread that was worth the trouble in the first place.
Empire has never really needed to reinvent itself to stay relevant. The bread is still shaped by hand, the starters are still fed daily, and the bakery that started because two people couldn’t find what they wanted has spent more than three decades making sure nobody else in Dallas has to go looking either.
