TFB seeks Site Plan Exemption

Aug 28, 2023

Dear Friends,

Y'all are amazing. Last month we opened up our Table 22 weekly bakery memberships and we have been delighted with the support. We asked and you delivered, basically doubling the size of our program. This is a huge help to TFB and we want everyone to have fresh baked goods in their pantry each week. We have room for a few more if you're just coming back into town from summer vacation and want to put a little TFB in your kitchen during back to school season. Sign up here.

The Garden is now Open Daily

Beginning today, we'll be open 7 days a week in the TFB Garden. I think our daytime breakfast & lunch service is a hidden gem - emphasis on the hidden part. A tall board-form concrete wall keeps the secret garden hidden (longer story on how that came to be for another day).

This is a) great, because it feels like such an oasis, but also b) not so great, because many folks don’t know we’re open behind those walls.

My point is - the TFB garden is really a beautiful space. And if you’ve not yet visited, I’d love to invite you to swing by when you have a moment - I mean, we've all got to get ourselves back to the garden, right?. The grand heritage oak provides great shade and believe it or not, it's actually quite pleasant, even on these rather toasty end of summer days. We've got the friendliest folks working the trailer and you can pop by for a cortado and breakfast tostadas, or our current favorite, the breakfast sandwich, which comes with melted cheese on a homemade English muffin, Peaceful Pork Ham and a farm fresh Milagro Farm egg. We’ve also got a full list of classic TFB sandwiches and a full selection of fresh breads & pastries.

Update on the REBUILD (and how you can help)

Ok - the good news is that we are making progress and getting closer to our goal of resurrecting 2900 Rio Grande. Late last spring we signed up to work with a group of developers and architects who pushed through the Seaholm project downtown. We're super excited to have their help. And we recently finalized a design package in support of a permit application to rebuild our building more or less exactly as it was.

Since the fire, our understanding has been that if we submitted our application as a "rebuild" permit, the city would allow us to dive right in, avoiding the elaborate and time consuming process known as "site plan review". Plan review can easily take a year or even longer, and in our case would almost certainly make it near impossible to rebuild anything like the grand old building that had stood at the corner of 29th St. since the 1940s.

Well, it turns out weren’t wrong about the permit, but unfortunately learned to our dismay that buried in all that city code, there's provision imposing a short 12 month time limit within which to apply for the type of exemption we need. In order to meet that 12 month deadline we would have had to have the permit submitted by January of this year. Instead we spent all of last year and then some opening the commissary bakery and trying to get the TFB operation restarted. Fortunately, it does seem possible that the development office could waive the 12 month limitation - which is what we are now asking them to do.

So - at the risk of being a bit woo woo, we’re hoping to enlist the help of everyone in our extended TFB community to be in agreement that we are allowed to rebuild 2900 Rio Grande. To do this anytime soon, we will need the aforementioned site plan exemption. Let’s all think positive thoughts. (and, wiggle our noses?)

And finally - if anyone has friends in the Mayor's office, or on the counsel, or for that matter in the development department itself who you think might lend a sympathetic ear, we'd sure love to visit with them.

Thanks again for all of your support - hope to see many of you in the garden soon - and please cross your fingers that we get the needed site plan exemption.

bon appetit,

murph

PS - big ups to Chloe Ryland. When she's not on the bar making picture perfect espresso drinks, she's managing the operation and our Instagram feed taking gorgeous pictures of our work at TFB. Kudos, Chloe!

More Ways to Support TFB's Rebuild