Old Colorado City was a separate municipality for the first three decades of its existence. A mining era boomtown that predates Colorado Springs itself and carries that seniority in the texture of its buildings, its slightly wayward street layout, and the particular quality of its independent shops and restaurants. West Colorado Avenue, the neighbourhood's main corridor, has resisted homogenisation with more success than most American commercial streets of comparable age. La Baguette has been part of that resistance since 1984.
The bakery operates on a philosophy simple enough to state in a single sentence and difficult enough to execute that most operations compromise on it within a few years: everything is baked fresh every day from natural ingredients, without preservatives or artificial enhancers, using the French tradition as the reference point and the local environment as the adaptation. The bread that emerges from this process has the qualities that bread is supposed to have and rarely does in American commercial kitchens. A crust that resists slightly before giving way, a crumb with genuine structural character, a flavour that sustains attention beyond the first bite.
The cafe operation that surrounds the bakery provides the context for a proper morning or midday meal: soups made from scratch from whatever the kitchen considers appropriate for the season, sandwiches assembled from ingredients that were purchased in their whole form and converted on-site, and a selection of pastries that treats the croissant with the respect it deserves while acknowledging that Colorado has its own contributions to make to the category. The upstairs wine bar adds an evening dimension to a place that could comfortably be restricted to mornings. A selection of fine wines and craft cocktails served in a room that looks out over Old Colorado City's rooftops with a composure appropriate to forty years of good practice.
For the solo traveller in Colorado Springs who wants a morning that is genuinely unhurried. The newspaper, the bread, the coffee prepared by people who know how. La Baguette provides one of the American West's most reliable versions of that particular pleasure.