Tim Topi, the Master Baker at Wave Hill Breads who co-owns the business with his wife Angela doesn’t look at his business in terms of customers and competitors. Instead, he sees them as friends and inspiration, respectively.
With Wave Hill’s new café on Westport Avenue, which had a soft opening announced via Facebook on a Saturday morning in June, he aims to find more of both.
In addition to the breads that have already established Wave Hill as one of the region’s best bakeries, named one of the Top 100 in the US 2020 by Food & Wine Magazine, the new Westport Avenue location offers a full coffee bar with sandwiches, pastries and pizzas. Topi emphasized that the same emphasis on fresh ingredients, locally sourced whenever possible, will be immediately apparent to customers, particularly a fully hydrated pizza dough which he says is unlike anything else he is aware of in Norwalk.
The sleek and brightly lit space also offers a selection of local and imported dry goods and kitchen implements. The house coffee brand, Trucillo is imported from Naples, Italy.
“I see customers I’ve known for ten years, and I say, ‘my friend’, and we use the word ‘friend’ even if I don’t know their name because I would see them for twice a week, sometimes three times a week,” Topi said. One of his biggest regrets is that while running the full-scale Wave Hill Bakery at 30 High Street or manning a stand at a farmer’s market he can’t offer them a cup of coffee.
“My customer is my friend; we spend all our life here. We sleep where we sleep but I spend like 12 to 15 hours a day here, especially in the baker’s life and being a business owner too. That’s really the only thing you can want, to know your customers. The products, recipes, the whole of your life is invested when you are in this business. It’s not just for income.”
Topi added that after having devoted so much time and effort into developing products and recipes, it was his dream not only to share them with his customers through instructional classes to begin in the new space this September, but to see those recipes spur better bread from other bakers and restaurateurs.
“I had a friend ask, ‘Tim, who is your competition?’ I said I there is no competition, it’s me. If I wake up in the morning I’m going to do amazing things, if I don’t wake up there’s hundreds of other people who can do something similar,” Topi said, emphasizing that he had concentrated on cultivating relationships at farmers markets to source the freshest local ingredients and training staff who are all capable of starting their own business endeavors.
“I like it when they’re better than us because then we try harder. We have to try to be on top of the quality, if they’re better I get inspired.”
He believes that Norwalk can cultivate a tourism industry that could even rival New York City among some travelers if it can reach the right concentration of enticing eateries.
Presently the café is open Wednesday through Saturday from 5 am to 9 pm, and 8 am to 6 pm on Sundays, but Topi said he hopes to expand the hours in the near future, as well as offer baking classes and group events in private rooms.
For the menu and more details, visit https://www.wavehillbreads.com/menu
