Good Wednesday morning and welcome to day four of Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week, where we are spending time with Ben Rosario, the owner of Ben's Bread.

Each day this week, the Thread and Visit Tuscaloosa will highlight the city’s most in-demand dining locations and the hands that prepare our finest food in features published every morning.

Hungry for more? Over 40 participating eateries are also offering unique items or special discounts on their most popular orders all week long! Learn more and get connected at the Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week website now.

KICKSTARTING SUCCESS

A few months after opening his brick-and-mortar bakery on Loop Road, Ben Rosario finds himself a long way from where he started and good distance from where he wants to go, too.

The Sri Lankan British baker moved from the UK to Tuscaloosa with his wife Sarah seven years ago and, at first, he taught piano lessons at the University of Alabama's Community Music School.

While he did, though, Rosario began taking steps to turn his growing love for breaking sourdough bread into something bigger and sold it at the Tuscaloosa Rivermarket for the first time in 2020.

"The first market I ever did, I made 18 loaves of bread and it nearly killed me," he said. "By the time I finished, I could like bake upwards of 60 loaves, 100 bagels and 50 croissants, working out of my house, all made for Saturday morning."

As his popularity at the market grew, his business - simply named Ben's Bread - was outgrowing his space to bake at scale in his own home, but Rosario lacked the capital to just go buy a building and get busy. Instead, he launched a successful online crowdfunding campaign and secured enough money to lease the former Kozy's building at 3510 Loop Road.

Ben's Bread bakery officially opened there earlier this year, and Rosario said he's tripling his former output but still wants to continue to increase the quantity of baked goods he creates and sells without sacrificing on quality.

He said he's toyed with changing the name of his brand a few times and started to use the buildout of the bakery as a way to do that, but ultimately decided to stick with what works.

"I'd come up with Wild Arcadian Bakery, which on paper, I thought was great," Rosario said. "But every time I tried to say it to someone I kind of cringed. I felt pretentious and I couldn't say it and own it. All of my existing customers like Ben's Bread and we crowdfunded that way, so here we are."

BAKING AS MAGIC, NOT SCIENCE

Rosario said his interest in baking was sparked almost a decade ago when he was still living in the UK and watching the extremely popular Great British Bake Off series.

Rosario's sourdough bread, bagels, bomboloni doughnuts and more are far simpler than the show's signature Showstopper spectaculars, though.

"The bread, on the whole, is as simple as possible, with fewer ingredients. Bread is just flour, water, salt. You hear that all the time with bread, don't you?" Rosario said. "But I don't put sugar or oil or butter in anything except for items like croissants and donuts. Otherwise, it's all this really old-fashioned kind of bread-making, I suppose the wy\ay bread was made hundreds of years ago."

Baking is often presented as a science - adding the right ingredients in precisely the right portions and cooking them just according to the recipe will yield consistent results.

But Rosario said even after almost a decade as a baker, his experience is still far less clinical than all that.

"There's a bit of magic to it and every time I bake I'm like, 'Is it going to work? Is it going to work?" Rosario said.

None of his baked goods feature commercial yeast, it's all pure sourdough and wild yeast, and variations in temperature and humidity and his ratio of ingredients all factor in to making each batch of bread taste unique.

"It's like chaos theory and a small change anywhere can have a bigger impact further down and especially for something like a croissant, which takes all week to prepare, I can mess up on Monday and won't know until Saturday," Rosario said. "But the excitement of getting the stuff out of the bed of the oven at four in the morning and seeing how it's all turned out, the magic of that never goes away."

The bakery also now features a growing coffeeshop, where Ben's business partner Nanda serves English breakfast teas, drip coffee and more, with plans to expand into espresso when it's feasible.

SIMPLE, ORGANIC FOOD MADE WITH LOVE

After seven years in Alabama, Rosario said he is still struck by the sense of community here. People's pre-orders kept him afloat and mostly anxiety-free during the worst of the pandemic at the Rivermarket. The Kickstarter raised more than $30,000 to open the bakery, where support continues to pour in - even the mugs available in the coffee shop are donated.

"So much of this is thanks to an incredible level of commitment from people and faith in me to make them something they want to eat," Rosario said. "There's a huge amount of enthusiasm which I am so grateful for, and when I get an email about how much someone enjoyed something I've baked, I appreciate that kind of feedback because half the time, I like it but then sometimes I spend a lot of time worrying that what I'm making is no good."

But it is good, of course - especially Rosario's 18-layer croissants, which he laminates by hand in a process that take several days to prepare and bake.

Quiet days at the bakery, which opens on Thursday, Friday and Saturday mornings, can still fill Rosario with existential dread, but he said every week since opening has been a successful one.

Looking ahead, Rosario said he wants to look at also opening on Wednesday, expanding both the food and drink menu, and continuing to enhance the community side of Ben's Bread, like eventually adding a public garden and a children's play structure to become a one-stop destination for "organic, wholesome, family stuff."

"Community and customer support really keep my enthusiasm up. The fact that people want to book orders and pay in advance, they want to get here early, queue out the door to get the croissants when they first come out - feedback from them is the best motivator, it just gives me energy," he said. "It gives me so much motivation to make more stuff, interesting stuff, better stuff."

Rosario said he is also motivated by gratitude - that without these years of support from the community, he never could have turned his hobby into what it has become today.

"This is would have been undoable in every way without that support, so I feel completely indebted to everyone," he said. "I feel so grateful all the time for all the help and support because none of this would have been possible otherwise, none of it. I had no money to do this, so people did this, people made this happen and continue to support it and it's been like that right from the beginning. I couldn't be more grateful."

Ben's Bread opens at 9 a.m. at 3510 Loop Road every Thursday, Friday and Saturday to fill pre-orders and walk-in sales.

During Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week, Rosario is offering your choice of his new Danish pastries - a savory option with sauteed mushrooms and gruyere cheese in the center, or a sweet offering with berries and custard.

"If you like simple, organic food made with love that's as fresh as can be then come and give it a try," Rosario said.

This profile is the fourth in a series as part of Visit Tuscaloosa's Restaurant Week 2024, which is presented this year by UA Online.

Stay connected to the Tuscaloosa Thread for more features every morning this week. We'll be back Thursday morning with Mandy Singh at Sitar of India.