Field Trips

By Rachel Syme 02/25/10 at 03:58PM

Inside No. 7 Sub's Brooklyn Bakery

Sometime in the next week or so (but they're not committing to an exact day), Brooklyn farm-to-table restaurant No. 7, which has been slapped with all sorts of awards and national attention, will open a classic sub shop inside Manhattan's Ace Hotel. Chef Tyler Kord, who has been working on the sub shop with his business partner Matthew Suchomski for a year now, is uniquely qualified to run such a place--he was a Subway "sandwich artist" back in 1996. He learned some valuable lessons from that experience ("Don't use a microwave to heat things up and never serve pickes in bags") before going on to graduate from FCI and work under Jean-Georges at Perry St.

Now, Kord and his pastry chef Amanda Clarke (who has worked for both Jean-Georges and Danny Meyer before joining her old friend Kord) are preparing to open the ultimate hero outpost--and they knew they had to do it by making their own bread. Last week, Feast reported that the pair have established an independent bakery on the border of Crown/Prospect Heights, where they intend to make the sub bread, dessert cookies, and soda syrups that will keep the sub shop stocked throughout the day. This week, we had the privilege of being the first to see the new bakery, complete with its giant ovens pilfered from an old Dunkin Donuts. "When you turn the proofer on," Clarke laughs. "It says, 'Are you ready to make some munchkins?'"

The bakery, which sits next to the cafe Glass Shop on Classon Avenue (and outfits them with cookie test batches), will officially start pumping out bread sometime this week. Though Clarke and her colleagues hope to eventually get up to 600 loaves by 9 a.m. (the sub shop will open at 11:30), right now she says they will be lucky to make 300 a day by the opening. The result will likely be that when the shop opens,when they run out of bread, they will close down. Translation: Get there right at opening for a chance at a sub until operations are at full speed.

The shop will also specialize in half-moon cookies, which Clarke, a Western New Yorker, argues "are originally from upstate, and are like black & white cookies but made with a chocolate base and buttercream--as opposed to glaze--frosting. Black & white cookies are far inferior and I'm proud that these will be the only dessert on the sub shop menu." In addition, Clarke will craft syrup bases for homemade fountain sodas, which the shop will serve in yuzu-ade, maple cream, and hibiscus ginger at opening.

Clarke's bread is soft and gooey, due to the fact that she makes it with milk. "We also use flaxseed and oatmeal, and use bran to form them, so it's a hearty bread," she says. Each loaf takes about 3 hours to make, so for the beginning she plans on pulling a few all-nighters to make the shop run.

The bakery will not be open to the public, but it won't be closed off either, so go on by and take a look. Kord did hint at selling bread or No. 7 products out of the bakery in the future, but it's hard to say how serious the claim was: "Maybe I'll advertise the bread only on ChatRoulette," he jokes. "You have to click through a lot of weirdos to get to me, where I'll just be holding up an email address you can use to get the loaves."

Lastiy, Clarke and her team will wear matching T-shirts, emblazoned with the bakery's unofficial name: Bun Panthers.