City Bakery
A bakery first, a café second
City Bakery is a long-standing Asheville institution built around actual bread. Artisan loaves are baked in house, and everything else on the menu — the pastries, the sandwiches, the salads, the coffee — sits downstream of that. It is a bakery that happens to have tables, rather than a café that happens to sell pastries.That distinction matters more than it sounds. Plenty of places in Asheville do excellent coffee and buy their bread in. Here it runs the other way around, and it shows in what people carry out the door: a loaf under one arm.
Start with the bread
If it is your first visit, buy bread. It is the reason the place has lasted, and it is the clearest expression of what the kitchen does well. Take a loaf home even if you came in for coffee — it is the thing you will be glad you did.The pastry case is the other half of the argument. Sitting somewhere with a pastry and a coffee, mid-morning, on no particular schedule, is close to the ideal use of this room.
It is a real lunch stop, not just a pastry counter
The sandwiches and salads are the part people tend to overlook. Because the bread is made on site, the sandwiches start from a genuinely better foundation than most — which is exactly what you would hope for from a bakery that also serves lunch.It works well as a sit-down meal or as something to take away, and it fills the gap between a coffee shop that only does pastries and a restaurant that wants your whole afternoon.
Who it suits
Breakfast, an unhurried lunch, a coffee-and-something stop between other plans, or picking up bread on the way home. It is comfortable solo and works for a small group, and it draws a mix of regulars and visitors rather than skewing entirely to either.It is a good default when you are with people who want different things — someone wants a proper lunch, someone else just wants coffee and a pastry, and both are easily satisfied without a compromise.
Worth knowing before you go
Bakeries run on what came out of the oven that morning, and the best things go first. If there is a specific loaf or pastry you have your heart set on, earlier is genuinely better — by the afternoon the case looks different, and popular items may be gone entirely.This is standard for any bakery worth visiting, and it is the single most useful thing to know when planning a trip around one.
More of Asheville's coffee and café scene
City Bakery is one stop on a city with a deep café culture. See our guide to Asheville's coffee scene for the wider picture, or browse every coffee shop and café we cover to build a route of your own.
Specialty Food
Artisan Bread; Pastries; Sandwiches; Salads; Coffee; Espresso
Reservations: No
Location: 88 Charlotte St, Asheville, NC 28801
(North Asheville location)
Phone: (828) 254-4289
Opening Hours: Mon-Sat 7:30 AM-2:30 PM
Closed Sunday
Parking: Lot
WiFi: Yes
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