Razava Bread Co.
Bakery · Summit Hill
685 Grand Ave, St Paul, MN 55105
Highlights
Sourdough breads, bagels, baguettes, flatbreads, coffee, shakshuka
Sourdough breads, bagels, baguettes, flatbreads, coffee, shakshuka
"This bakery on St. Paul’s Grand Avenue debuted in December 2024, carrying on the legacy of the former Baldinger Bakery, founded by owner Steve Baldinger’s family in 1888. Head baker Omri Zin-Tamir of Bakery on 22nd Street commands production of the menu that includes San Francisco sourdough loaves, baguettes, pita, challah, and two styles of bagels — Jerusalem and New York. Accent the bagels with schmear, lox, and even roasted stone fruit. To drink, customers can expect coffee, tea, and shrubs. — Brenna Houck" - Serena Maria Daniels
"A Grand Avenue bakery turning out sourdough loaves, bagels, and flatbreads — a neighborhood staple for quality bread products." - Stacy Brooks
"Head baker Omir Zin-Tamir has a distinctive approach to sourdough, crafting his rustic breads from a high-hydration dough that ferments for up to four days. A trip through an 800-plus degree open-flame oven creates a dark, slightly caramelized crust, and each slice is bursting with the rich flavor of stone-ground whole grains. In addition to loaves of the house loaf, miche, and San Francisco-style sourdough, the bakery’s shelves are stocked with pitas, sesame-encrusted Jerusalem bagels, and Zin-Tamir’s take on the classic New York bagel. Razava is even certified by Minnesota Kosher." - Stacy Brooks
"Opened with limited hours on Thursday, December 12; the team includes head baker Omri Zin-Tamir and owner Steve Baldinger (whose family founded Baldinger Bakery in West St. Paul in 1888). The menu specializes in slow-fermented sourdough, challah, pita, and bagels." - Serena Maria Daniels
"A soon-to-open, full-scale bakery led by Omri Zin-Tamir with capacity for up to 600 loaves a day and a commercial setup built for time-managed fermentation and high-heat baking: the back wall is outfitted with four taps feeding four separate fermentation chambers, there’s a hulking European-style mixer for precise water and temperature control, a high-heat open-flame oven that reaches 800–900 degrees for rustic, crustier breads, and a double-decker convection oven as the bakery’s “workhorse.” The program spans hearty, high-extraction house loaves and tangy San Francisco–style white sourdough to pizza crusts, pita, challah and — eventually — bagels (a hybrid with New York–style water content but baked in high heat like Montreal–style bagels), plus dine-in breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes that treat bread as an ingredient rather than a vessel: expect shakshuka with candy-sweet tomatoes and chuma (a spicy Libyan Jewish condiment) served with a hunk of house loaf; pizza-like flatbreads layered with artichoke cream and roasted eggplant; and a baguette topped with anchovies, mayo and lemon zest, alongside coffee and wine. The venture explicitly links to a family baking legacy via an old Eastern European rye called razava — an exceptionally dark, dense rye once sold as a health food — and represents a blend of “old-world wisdom” with modern daily-bakery rigor; as Zin-Tamir puts it, “Everything in this bakery is going to be time-based and made with the old-world wisdom that the commercial baking industry has forsaken along the way.” Technically, the bakery emphasizes high-hydration dough (typically in the high 80s hydration), cold fermentation that can stretch a batch to three-and-a-half or four days from the starter’s removal from the fridge, and even a reliance on unfiltered, unaltered tap water as one of Zin-Tamir’s baking ‘secrets.’ He describes the operation as the “noisy, clunky pirate ship bakery” he’s always imagined, and jokes with his bakers: “people like their bread white, and then they put it in a toaster, so why not give it to them from the start? … It’s much better when you bake it dark. You get those amino acids, those Maillard reactions going, those caramelizations. The flavors come out, and you still have a really tender, soft crumb.” An opening is expected in early December." - Justine Jones
