The Little Oven

212 1/2 Peabody Street
Port Angeles, WA
(360) 452-4354

Reviewed: 15 March 2008

UPDATE: 14 February 2009 - The Little Oven is closed. The laundromat wanted its space back. The owners are taking over Good To Go on Lauridsen at Eunice. They'll be operating Good To Go while upgrading the kitchen and setting up a proper oven. We will keep you posted here and on the Kaleberg home page.

Ever since Bonny's closed some years back, Port Angeles has been without a really good bakery. A friend of ours noticed The Little Oven last fall. It shares a building with the laundromat on Peabody Street, and, as you can see from the picture, it doesn't look like much from the outside. We dropped by once and were impressed with the smell, but we didn't actually try the place until more recently. We ordered a bunch of sandwiches, some focaccia, some croissants and some of their cinnamon danish. We were quite impressed. Port Angeles has a bakery again, and an excellent one.

The sandwiches were all on focaccia, and they were excellent. The Little Oven uses salumi from Salumi in Seattle along with first rate ham, cheeses, olives and other fine ingredients. There is no stinting on flavor. As for the bread, it was superb, with a great chewy texture and lots of yeasty flavor. We tried all three of their sandwiches. The L.O. Special loads on the ham, salami, Beecher's Flagship cheese, tomato, greens, aioli and their own olive and vegetable spread. The salami sandwich comes with pecorino cheese, and the caprese sandwich with an excellent fresh mozzarella, tomato, and home made pesto. All told, we were quite impressed.

We had ordered a few croissants and some of their cinnamon danish. They make a dry cinnamon roll with cinnamon and raisins. Unfortunately, they have gotten so popular that they had sold out all their cinnamon danish before they even remembered our order, so we can only report that their croissants are amazingly good. They are buttery and yeasty and puffy and chewy and all those other good things that we yearn for in a croissant. Given all the plastic air puff croissants that one finds around, The Little Oven croissants are up there with the best.

The Little Oven is great! Our only worry is that they have only a little oven. They open at 7:30, and they sell out early. Right now they have no expansion plans, so we'll just make sure we get there early. If you want some magnificent baked goods, you should give them a try too.