Arkady Kats saw it coming. He’d been building and selling big houses on the North Shore for 15 years when, last summer, he decided he’d better get out of real estate. “We kind of had a feeling that the bull market is going to hell,” he says. “Numbers really did not work last year already, so around last summer this is when we decided that we gonna have a Great Depression.”
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Kats and his wife, Rita, opened Bread ‘n’ Bowl Company in a Niles strip mall in late July, offering 16 soups—all natural, never frozen—at the ridiculously low price of $3 for 16 ounces, $5 for 32. While they’re tasty and include some unusual varieties (beef tomato and apricot, spinach lemon and turkey meatballs), they’re enhanced immeasurably by a piece of the Georgian flatbread—the round puri or the cocoon-shaped shoti—baked daily behind the counter in a massive barrel-like brick oven called a toné.
Kats, who came to the U.S. from Kiev via Rome in 1989, also offers a few eastern European cakes, and handmade dumplings (pierogi and pelmeni) and puff pastries (pirozhki). Specific Georgian varieties include the cheese-filled puff pastries known as khachapuri. Traditionally these are filled with a cheese called suluguni, but in this case it’s a frozen, ground mixture of mozzarella and several fetas. (He recommends calling in orders ten minutes ahead to get these hot from the oven.)
The toné can handle about 40 puris at a time. When it’s reached capacity, the first are puffed and blistered. Gelashvili grips a long pole in each arm—one with a hook on the end, and the other with a spatula—and plucks the loaves from the oven. He can do hundreds each day, and does so when the bakery has orders from a half dozen or so supermarkets and restaurants. But nothing beats the hot, chewy, stretchy bread pulled straight from the oven.
7239 W. Dempster, Niles, 312-388-8494
