Bread and Chocolate Website

About Bread & Chocolate

Bread & Chocolate is a Washington, DC bakery, café, and coffee shop with deep roots in European baking and neighborhood hospitality. Founded in 1978 by Theodore Manousakis and Chef Ernst Moser, Bread & Chocolate began with a vision of bringing European artisan bread, fine Viennese pastries, French desserts, and café-style food to the Washington, DC area.

From the beginning, Bread & Chocolate was built around quality, craft, and the simple pleasure of sharing good food. The first location included both a storefront café and a full production facility, allowing the company to serve customers directly while also producing baked goods and prepared foods for a growing wholesale business. What began as one bakery and café grew into a broader regional presence, with locations and wholesale relationships throughout Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

Over the years, Bread & Chocolate has remained connected to the traditions that shaped its identity. The company’s foundation is rooted in old-world cooking and baking: artisan breads, pastries, cakes, desserts, prepared foods, coffee, breakfast, lunch, brunch, and café service. Customers may visit for morning coffee, French desserts, fresh baked goods, casual meals, weekend brunch, carryout, delivery, or catering.

Today, Bread & Chocolate describes itself as a bakery and coffee shop located in the Downtown DC area and Chevy Chase. The company promotes dine-in, carryout, and delivery, and invites customers to visit for breakfast, coffee, French desserts, and cuisine. Its menu includes breakfast, lunch, dinner, brunch, hot beverages, cold beverages, gourmet coffee, and café offerings.

The Bread & Chocolate menu also lists coffee and tea brands that fit the café experience, including Lavazza Dark Roast, Lavazza House Blend, Lavazza Decaf House Blend, and Mighty Leaf Tea. Those beverage offerings help reinforce the company’s café identity alongside its bakery, pastry, dessert, brunch, and prepared-food services.

As Washington, DC changed, Bread & Chocolate evolved with it. In the 1980s and 1990s, the company expanded beyond its original retail café model into larger-scale production, wholesale prepared foods, and packaged gourmet food. Bread & Chocolate served hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, universities, airports, hospitals, sports arenas, shopping malls, and other businesses that needed high-quality baked goods and prepared foods. Co-packing also became an important part of the company’s work, allowing Bread & Chocolate to produce and package products for other companies according to their recipes and specifications.

The company now operates locations at 2301 M Street NW in downtown Washington, DC and 5542 Connecticut Avenue NW in Chevy Chase. Those locations serve customers looking for breakfast, coffee, French desserts, dine-in meals, carryout, delivery, weekend brunch, and catering services.

What makes Bread & Chocolate distinctive is the connection between professional culinary experience and neighborhood service. Behind the bakery cases, café counters, menus, and catering offerings is a long tradition of production, preparation, and hospitality. The company’s cakes, pastries, prepared foods, and café offerings reflect the work of culinary professionals who understand both the craft of baking and the expectations of customers, clients, and organizations they serve.

Bread & Chocolate’s philosophy is simple: to serve friends and neighbors. For more than four decades, the company has served its community with European-style pastries, baked goods, prepared foods, and café hospitality. In a city as internationally diverse as Washington, DC, food creates connection. Bread & Chocolate has built relationships with customers, families, businesses, institutions, and community members who return for familiar favorites and discover new reasons to come back.

Whether someone stops in for coffee and breakfast, picks up a pastry, orders lunch, enjoys weekend brunch, arranges catering, or works with Bread & Chocolate on wholesale or prepared food production, the goal remains the same: to provide food that is made with care and served with professionalism.

From its founding in 1978 to its current Washington, DC locations, Bread & Chocolate has remained committed to quality, tradition, and service. It is both a bakery and a café, both a local gathering place and a food production company, and both a long-standing DC institution and an evolving culinary business.