Chas Barwick defines a good biscuit as, “One that doesn’t crumble to pieces when you bite into it, and really butter-forward.” Barwick opened Town Biscuits last fall with her husband, Will Kovach, a chef with 15 years of culinary experience.
“He leads the kitchen team,” Barwick said. “He’s been the one really working on the recipes and helping get them all to scale.” Barwick is the operations manager at Town Biscuits, with front- and back-of-house experience. Bad biscuits, she added, are dry and “leave you wanting water.”
Before opening, the couple’s R&D process for the recipe took about six months. “Then, once we got into our commercial kitchen, we had to do a whole other R&D because the ovens are different,” Barwick said. They also made more adjustments when the volume increased from 12 biscuits at a time to 30 or 60 biscuits per batch.
“When we thought about biscuits and biscuit sandwiches we were like, ‘This is a thing that isn’t happening here in the Bay Area,’” the North Carolina native said. Biscuit restaurants are commonplace in the South. “Seeing that need really gave us the confidence to move forward,” she added. An unwavering confidence in their product comes through on their website: “The best in the Bay Area, and frankly, anywhere.”
The menu pairs “handmade, fresh, flakey, soft, and buttery buttermilk biscuits” with ingredients such as fried chicken, sausage and gravy, ham, eggs, or jam and goat cheese. The crispy and spicy fried chicken biscuit ($10), while delicious, is also a lot of dough against dough. Perfect for a hangover cure, but not a light dish. As is, the recipe prevents a soggy-bottomed biscuit situation. It holds up well when it’s delivered. Customers can add their own condiments, lettuce or a slaw, when the package arrives at their front door. To-go orders, Barwick told me, make up 60% of the business. That percentage is followed by dine-in orders at 30%, and the rest is catering.
“When we were developing the concept, we wanted it to be something that would travel well and keep it really simple,” Barwick said. “We wanted it to be something that we could wrap up and people could eat on the go, on their way to work.”
While I sat at the cafe snacking on a blueberry-jam-and-goat-cheese biscuit ($9), several customers came in to pick up their to-go orders. “We started, just Will and I, and it was to-go only for about a month,” Barwick recalled. But customers sat down to eat in the cafe. “It got really busy so we just said, ‘Let’s go full force and open the dining room and see what happens.’”
The dining room belongs to Town Biscuits Thursday through Sunday mornings until 2pm. Barwick and Kovach operate out of Platform 43 Kitchens, a shared space for fledgling restaurants and pop-ups. “What’s going on at that kitchen is so special,” Barwick said.
When the couple met Jeff Nibler, Platform 43’s business services manager, he presented the new cafe space to them. “He was looking for somebody to come in and open a breakfast concept, so it was really a perfect alignment,” Barwick said. She added that they were able to start out without having to commit to a long lease or jumping into a brick and mortar. “It’s so helpful for people who are wanting to get into the food business to try out a concept,” she said. This past spring Fungi Foods opened in the same space. Fungi opens at 5pm for dinner.
Nibler is also building out a cook line. Barwick said that currently the building has a better set-up for catering kitchens. The appliances are spread out. In the new configuration the flat top, the fryer and the expo station will all be in one place.
“When we’re not operating, other people are going to be able to use the cook line too,” she said. “It’s really cool because we were able to help fire up this initiative of, ‘You can really come in here to plug and play your own restaurant concept.’”
Town Biscuits, 434 25th St., Oakland. Open Thu-Fri, 7am to 2pm; weekends 9am to 2pm. IG: @townbiscuits
