On Gerritt Street, a South Philly bakery has become something bread alone can’t explain.

IT’S EASY TO MISS. GERRITT STREET cuts through South Philadelphia diagonally, a narrow block just off Columbus Square Park. There’s little foot traffic and no bustling commercial corner drawing people past. You have to know it’s there, or someone has to tell you.

But by now everyone in town has found it. And they come back, and then they send other people, and those people come back too. On Saturday mornings, long before Mighty Bread Co. had a café or a beer program or a second location or 65 employees, neighbors lined up to buy sourdough from a folding table inside a 450-square-foot room. The last Saturday before COVID shut everything down, some of them cried. One of them might have been me.

Between the time Chris DiPiazza baked his first sourdough loaf for fun and earlier this year when he won stand-out baker at the Tasties awards, a lot has happened for Mighty Bread on Gerritt Street and beyond.

BEFORE THERE WAS A BAKERY

DiPiazza founded Mighty Bread Co. in 2015 out of the Center for Culinary Enterprises in West Philadelphia, baking one loaf a week, Baker’s Choice, and delivering it to three pickup locations around the city. He was running an IT company at the time—a business he co-founded in his 20s and still runs today.

Mighty Bread’s origin story took the shape of a series of fortunate accidents. DiPiazza’s daughter’s daycare was on 15th Street, where he kept running into Emilio Mignucci and Scott Case over morning coffee at Ultimo and eventually landed a wholesale account at Di Bruno Bros. Later, when DiPiazza brought a loaf to a granite fabricator on Gerritt Street to say thank you for a fast countertop job, he was offered the chance to rent a room at the back of his building.

“The thing I didn’t realize about the space then,” DiPiazza says, “was that there was a lot of extra room that would ultimately become available to us as we needed it.”

That 450-square-foot room is now nearly 7,000 square feet. They bake 1,300 loaves a day. And around 1,000 pastries on top of that. There are 85 wholesale customers, a full café, and a beer program. Today there’s a second Mighty Bread location at 17th and Pine and the business seems poised to keep growing.

THE WORST RETAIL LOCATION IN THE WORLD

For several years, DiPiazza himself staffed that folding table inside the original room on Saturdays, selling bread to anyone who could find them. They would go 45 minutes without a customer. They joked that Gerritt Street was the worst retail location in the world—that even if you knew where it was, you might not find it.

“Somebody told me you were down here,” people would say when they finally made it through the door. “I looked and I didn’t see it.”

The obscurity became part of the story. People who found Mighty Bread felt they had discovered something special, and they had. The bread—sourdough, naturally leavened, with a dark crust—speaks for itself. When DiPiazza finally put A-frame signs on 12th Street with arrows pointing the way, sales doubled.

“Social media is great,” he says, “but don’t underestimate a sign on the sidewalk.”

WHAT A BAKERY CAN BE

The café that opened in late 2021—built into an adjacent space that once housed a ballroom venue—has 30 seats, a 12-seat courtyard, and what DiPiazza describes as an Italian-style arc to the day: Coffee and breakfast in the morning gives way to a busy lunch. An aperitivo service runs from 4 to 6 on weekdays, with a menu of drinks and dishes that don’t appear on the daytime menu.

“In Italy, there’s no difference in the word for bar—coffee bar or alcoholic bar,” he says. “It changes throughout the day. You go in for coffee and there’s still the full rack of liquor behind it.”

He had been thinking about this model for years before he had the space to try it. The language he uses for Mighty Bread is not the language of a restaurant or even a café. He calls it a spot. Somewhere you come when you had a bad day and want to make it better, or a good day and want to mark it.

“A visit to Mighty Bread doesn’t have to dominate your day to be a part of your day,” he says.

The regulars make his point. Strollers roll through in mornings, parents with small children who have each developed a fierce allegiance to a specific cookie or tea cake. Then there are the restaurant industry workers who come in on Mondays, their day off, because Mighty Bread is open and because they know the bread from the restaurants where it’s served. The older Italian American neighbors come in specifically to order from a front-of-house staffer who speaks Italian.

Many of the regulars are wedded to their habits. “There’s a man who has gotten only a country loaf every single week since we opened,” DiPiazza says. “I asked him once if he ever wanted to try anything else. He said, “Nothing is ever quite right. I know what I like.’”

BREAD FOR A NEIGHBORHOOD

Mighty Bread is a James Beard Awards semifinalist and a Tasties honoree. A decade after its inception, the spot has been written about, photographed, celebrated. But none of that is why people keep showing up on a street with no foot traffic to buy a loaf they will carry home in a tote bag that says Meet me at Mighty Bread.

They show up because the bread and coffee are always excellent and because the person behind the counter knows their order, because the courtyard fills with neighbors on warm evenings who were just going to stay for one drink but linger.

Chris DiPiazza did not set out this magic and much-needed third place for Philadelphia. He set out to bake bread. But Gerritt Street turns out to be exactly the right spot for both.

Mighty Bread Co.
1211 Gerritt St, Philadelphia
Mighty Bread Grab & Go
1644 Pine St, Philadelphia