Babettes Pizza & Pane Finds a Home in Longmont

For Steve and Catherine Scott, reopening Babettes Artisan Breads in Longmont earlier this month was a homecoming. The couple has long lived in the Boulder County town, commuting each day—always in the pre-dawn hours for bread-baker Steve—to the previous iteration of Babettes at the Source in Denver. Now, the couple has scrapped the long drive and Mile High City address for Babettes Pizza & Pane, a bakery, pizza parlor, and gathering space, in Longmont’s Prospect Development.

The new space boasts two separate entrances. The bakery (which opens at 7 a.m. and stays open until the pizzeria closes at 9 p.m.) is where you can go to pick up loaves of deep-brown, crackle-crusted breads, as well as a croissants, morning buns, lemon-poppyseed cakes, and other fresh-baked sweet and savory pastries. The Scotts also plan to sell balls of raw pizza dough, tins of the Bianco DiNapoli organic tomatoes that grace all of their pizzas, and pizza toppings for folks who’d like to make their own pies at home. “We’ve always had this retail dream,” Catherine says.

The pizzeria side opens at 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 11 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. The sunny, modern space—designed by Catherine—quickly fills with patrons sipping cocktails and glasses of wine from the mostly Italian list, sharing dishes of warm, olive-oil drenched olives and Piave Vecchio cheese, and leafing through the collection of cookbooks on the shelves as they wait for their pizzas and simple salads that seem to take a page out of the Gjelina playbook.

The pizzas, unsurprisingly, are marvels, with puffy, 100 percent organic sourdough crusts dappled with bubbles of char. Toppings range from local Hazel Dell mushrooms to Salumeria Biellese pepperoni—but we prefer the austere Bianca Di Latte. Topped with nothing more than mozzarella, Burrata, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and olive oil, it’s the best way to taste the slight tang and wood-fire flavor of the chewy crust itself.

2030 Ionosphere St., Unit H, closed Mondays