Less than 45 minutes from Toledo, just off the highway, are a series of nondescript, gray and orange buildings in Ann Arbor’s mostly ignored “Airport Business Park.” A small sign with a cartoon hand points towards a scene that looks more akin to an episode of The Wire than a Saturday afternoon retreat. But in one row of buildings sits the primary production venue for the beloved Zingerman’s family of businesses.
Zingerman’s Coffee Company, Zingerman’s Creamery, and Zingerman’s Bakehouse are pristine facilities that make some of the finest foods in the country. Each has its own retail shop where you can see the coffee beans being roasted, grab a loaf of bread still warm from the oven, and sample a slice of cheese, where the milk was pasteurized and made into curds. Each entrance is just a few yards from the next. Zingerman’s calls this row “Southside”—it is located five miles south of the Deli—and despite its bleak façade and lesser known location, it is a food destination more than worth the search.
The Coffee Company
Zingerman’s Coffee Company is a sleek space with 30-foot-tall metal ceilings. Tables for seating sit below high-resolution photos of coffee farms around the world. Behind the baristas is a massive window peering into the room where 3,000 pounds of coffee are roasted every week. Above the barista counter is a giant board with a graph listing 15 coffee varieties and 7 methods of brewing—105 different ways to order a cup of coffee.
I ordered a “Mokha Java” with a
Siphon filter, where an exact 25 grams of ground coffee were heated with 297 grams of water by a butane torch in an hourglass-like apparatus. The coffee came out clean and fresh, with a buttery almond nuttiness. “We sell things someone might never, ever have,” said Anya Pomykala, the Coffee Company’s retail manager.
The Creamery
Next to the Coffee Company is the Creamery, where they make fresh cheese and gelato. I strapped on a hairnet and went into the production facility. John Loomis, the Creamery’s founding partner, was hand-milling raw milk cheese curds that tasted salty and satisfyingly rubbery. A woman packed fresh pints of gelato.
The Creamery’s retail manager, Tessie Ives-Wilson, gave me a sample of a Manistique cheese aged in fresh cabbage leaves for two weeks. It had an enchanting, grassy funk. I also tried the strawberry cheesecake gelato that tasted as fresh as a summer picnic. If you don’t like any of the flavors they offer, you can meet with a gelato consultant in order to design your own. “We’re not just an industrial park, but a place for people to meet up [and] learn,” Ives-Wilson said.
The Bakehouse
Zingerman’s Bakehouse, the first tenant in Southside, began in 1992 as a way to provide better bread for the deli. It is now a Willy Wonka wonderland, with 130 employees working in intoxicatingly sweet-smelling rooms creating pastries, candy bars, cakes and breads with two 50,000-lb. brick ovens. They still use the same sourdough starter from 1992, the original batch of yeast, in order to make more than half of their breads every day. A single loaf can rest up to 18 hours in order to let the natural flavors come alive. “We allow the wheat to express itself,” said Frank Carollo, the Bakehouse’s founding partner.
The Bakehouse has an 800-square-foot retail shop that efficiently sells $2 million of baked goods per year. The shop is small, but warm, with clean wood shelves and a team of employees who are ready to cut you a sample of anything they baked that day. They list a daily baking schedule so you can buy a loaf moments removed from the oven.
I tried a Hungarian cinnamon-swirl bread called Somodi Kalacs that was soft and semi-sweet, and I tried the sourdough, which had a quick crunch to its crust, and a meaty, chewy inside. I imagined spreading some handmade pimento cheese on it, bought from next door, and rushed home with the strongest urge I have ever had to make a sandwich
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Dorian Slaybod is an attorney happily living in Toledo.
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