Hybrid Cafe and Steakhouse opening in Carmel Crossroads

May 3, 3033 – What do you get when you combine a love of baking, an addiction to single origin coffee, an appreciation for European wines, a soft spot for Wagyu and a taste for adventure? BreadSong. This new hybrid restaurant, serving espressos and pastries for breakfast and a series of sandwiches on house-baked breads for lunch, will eventually be topped off with a steakhouse by night.

Owners April and Hans Hess have most of the wine and much of the fun food figured out for their eminent launch sometime in early May at The Crossroads Carmel shopping center. Look for BreadSong where Nothing Bundt Cakes used to be. Their hours will be 10:30am to 5pm at first. They’ll see how it goes. Then the steakhouse, SteakCraft, should open in the following months. 

“The concept is actually a bakery, coffee shop/roaster and butcher during the day and a steakhouse and bar at night,” Hans explained. “The bakery has two parts. In the morning, we roast our own coffee and espresso beans, and we make pastries. Then, about half an hour before lunch service starts, we bake three types of bread for sandwiches, and also offer them for sale. We’ll have sourdough loaves for $8 for a big loaf, which will also be sliced for sandwiches, and we’ll make feather light rolls that are crispy on outside and fluffy on the inside, kind of banh mi style. Then there’s a sugared doughnut, made sandwich size.”  Hold that thought: it’s better than you think. 

This is clearly not their first rodeo. The couple started an innovative line of organic burger restaurants, called Elevation Burger, in Falls Church, VA, where April is from, and where the business—which they sold to FAT brands in 2019—is headquartered. Hess says he got tired of being in the office and not working day to day operations in an actual restaurant. After they moved back to Carmel, where’s he’s originally from, he started thinking about the next concept. “After I sold Elevation, I started re-evaluating things and realized I wanted to run my own place again. I love to bake but I also love steak, so the idea was BreadSong by day and SteakCraft by night.”

He explains that everything under the BreadSong/SteakCraft umbrella is about terroir, in one way or another. “We have single origin coffees and the Wagyu we offer for sandwiches comes from Japan, Marin and Australia. It all originated when we began collecting wine 20 years ago. When we started the burger chain, we had experienced all these different kinds of beef. Back then it was a novel concept: who talked about beef terroir? But we have Japanese A5, where the cattle are fed olives. Others are fed sake mash. What the animals are fed plays out in the ultimate flavors.”

You can explore on your own also. There will be butcher case when you walk in the door, with steaks, cheeses, charcuterie and local products, like High Top Ranch olive oil from Carmel Valley and sage honey from Palo Colorado. “All are expressions of somebody’s terroir,” says Hans. “Carmel does not hold everything I want to explore. I honor it, but I bring in other experiences.” 

They carefully source flour mostly from northern California and the southwest, and mill some of their own from hard winter wheat. They roast 6 pounds of coffee at a time, mainly sourced from Mexican beans grown at over 5,500 feet. “It’s not the chocolate [taste] you expect, but it has caramel and marshmallow and spice. We also source from a women’s co-op in Honduras, and we carry a Peruvian single origin that is a little different, with more expressive citrus notes. We aim to show how coffee is more than one thing: it has all these unique expressions.”

Another aspect of terroir is the art on the walls, currently by Christopher Burkett, whose photographs capture a moment in time. He took the shot of April and Hans that headlines this piece. 

This might be a good time to talk about what Hans refers to as his “super weird background.” Turns out his family, including his 3 older sisters, ran restaurants in Carmel while he was growing up, including From Scratch and Smalley’s Roundup in Salinas. Hans loved to bake from an early age and entered his bread into the Monterey County Fair at age 10, winning a second place trophy. 

But, he explains, “I didn’t like the whole restaurant scene and I walked away from it. I got a degree from Cal Poly in physics and studied Christian theology in Texas. I wanted to learn how to read Greek and improve my understanding of being reconciled to God! I ended up in Washington DC working for a Congressman from Michigan, but it turns out I did not like politics at all.” After that, he worked for real estate developer for a few years before developing the Elevation Burger concept.

“We were living in Falls Church and at that point, in 2003, we had all these fast food restaurants and there was no place our family could get a healthier fast meal. So we did our own. We cut and seasoned our own potatoes and fried them in olive oil. We offered grass-fed organic meat and veggie burgers and milkshakes. It took off, and we grew to 60 locations, mostly on the eastern seaboard and the Midwest.” 

Now, he’s happy to have just one restaurant to manage. He’s not much involved with the candy shop, Cottage of Sweets, his wife also runs in Carmel.

Back to that large sugared doughnut. “A donut in duck fat sounded like it could be amazing, so I perfected it at home. I was going for substantial but light inside. This is brioche-like in character. I had a conversation with an alcohol distributor, and he was going on about CBD-infused alcohol. People are actually buying CBD wine and alcohol!! I thought, I need a CBD sandwich! So, here we go! I made one the next day and thought, ‘Am I crazy??!!’ Well, everyone loves it.”

To be clear, it contains no actual CBD or THC. In this case, CBD stands for Chicken Bacon Donut sandwich and consists of a panko-crusted chicken thigh, bacon and a special Berber (North African) spice sauce, topped with garlic lemon aioli and dill pickles. “It’s amazing,” says Hans. “The acid and fat and sweetness and spice combo is really interesting and different.” He’s hoping it becomes the kind of flavor fave that brings you back multiple times weekly.

Just don’t plan on giving all your caloric love to the donuts. You might want to try the charcuterie sandwich (there are also charcuterie and cheese boards), a Thanksgiving turkey classic with cranberry or a chicken parm sandwich with Fontina and garlic roasted tomatoes. Most everything will be done in house, including fresh pesto. There’s the Purist, made of shaved rare roasted Marin Wagyu with cherry tomatoes and garlic lemon aioli on sourdough and the Burnt Ends sandwich, featuring chunks of Wagyu with creamy horseradish and steak sauce on a feather light roll. There’s also a bulgogi-style Wagyu banh mi with sweet chili sauce and a butter lettuce Cobb with Saint Agur blue cheese and smoked applewood bacon. Oh, and hand cut fries, double done in duck fat. 

Hungry yet?  

Bring your thirst for adventure, too. More on April’s choices for libations, which include Chablis, Champagne, Sancerre and a Rosé from Argentina, in a subsequent edition. 

The BreadSong is at 102 Crossroads Blvd, The Carmel Crossroads. Follow on Instagram for news of the upcoming opening: instagram.co/thebreadsong/