The West End Bakery — Restaurant in Asheville

What to say about this place? First, the good: the food is really good. Simple, but well prepared with fresh ingredients and presented in a very lovely way. The service folks when I ate there were very friendly. The place looks very good -- someone has a nice design eye for interiors, and the outdoor porch is a comfortable place to sit in good weather.

But...the place has gone through re-branding and reinvention a couple times now and seems sort of stuck halfway between the different versions of itself. Is it a bakery? A wine bar? A breakfast place? A bakery with wine? A wine bar with cookies and coffee? The different logos, the inaccurate website, the incorrect menus....all of them show relics of these different "West Ends of Christmas Past".

Some examples....TheWestEndAshville.com website is beautiful, but includes an menu that hasn't been updated, confusing hours, and a wine list that apparently doesn't exist anymore. Do they serve any of the beautiful flatbreads or wine pictured on the website? No, no they don't.

The phone number on yelp and tripadvisor is wrong, and there isn't a number even listed on the website. The food is good, but the service was pretty slow considering there were only three other patrons in the place when I was there...and I had ordered a sandwich.

The restaurant, in good coffee house style, offers internet service for guests, but the branding on the login page is from the bakery, and the wireless connection is terrible. When you search "West End Asheville" on Google, the website link in the search result connects to one place, but there's a "menu" link that goes to an entirely different, old website.

And they were out of two of their sandwich offerings and one toast offering as well as avocados and sausages....at just after noon.

Will the real "West End" please stand up?

The entire place feels like it is run by a talented chef with a good design eye who is cursed with a bad business sense and a vicious case of ADHD.

Allllll that said, I will definitely be going back to enjoy the friendly service and the fresh, good food. I am just not sure if I will be getting wine and flatbread or coffee and a breakfast sandwich. I just hope they manage to get all this straightened out, because I'd like the...

Okay, time for an update. The West end bakery has transformed itself once again and the result is a vast improvement. The espresso is among the best in town, coming from Penny Cup roasters, and now there's a really extensive selection of artisan goodies both savory and sweet. You can have a full and hearty breakfast or lunch or just coffee and a tasty pastry. Comfortable seating and smiling and cheerful staff, the new West End Bakery is now tops on my list THE OLD REVIEW - JUST IGNORE We have been through many incarnations of the West End Bakery, and each one starts with so much promise but quickly disappoints. We only had one visit with the newest version (Feb,2023) but it only takes one visit to turn you off so you don't want to come back and get burned again.

So here's my beef: I had the chicken salad sandwich on focaccia. They are a bakery and make their own focaccia which looks great but this was very tough as if it was several days old or they had put it into a microwave. The chicken salad was quite good but it was pretty skimpy and buried under lots and lots of greens. Served with super crispy, hard potato chips - you know, like the ones that can leave your gums bleeding. Our latte was okay but not as hot and rich as one could get, for example, at the Odds Cafe just down the street.

We sat on the old leather couch which might be comfortable if it wasn't so saggy that we almost touched the floor with our butts. The decor is passable with nice new tables throughout, but once again depressing gray walls - all in all a little austere.

And lastly, typically, the music was loud and intrusive so that if you're interested in having a heart-to-heart with your best friend or a quick business meeting, you're going to get drowned out and distracted by the odd and loud music.

Sorry for the negative review, but if you're going to open a restaurant you've got to think of some of these things if you want to get established and create a good customer base. We may try it again in a week or so and see if we get a different impression, but considering, I'm not...

As someone who’s local to this place every time I have come in it’s disappointing. The people who work here are rude and snooty and act overall, off. The staff had clearly forgotten about my egg and sausage sandwich order, because the place had emptied out since it had been about 25 minutes since I put it in. I had to go check on it and would you look at that, it came out 2 minutes later. My coffee was beyond cold at this point so I asked if given how long I waited I could have another cappuccino. Nope, you can pay another $5 for one though! Well, they certainly would have had my return patronage if they understood how much the customer experience matters in running a business. But they couldn’t care less because tourists are what keeps this place alive. Apparently I’m naive to think a bakery could have a simple sandwich made in less than half an hour. Had I waited longer, they likely would have asked why I didn’t say anything sooner. And you can tell based on my other review below I actually hoped this place would become more than it is. And, the sandwich was NOT it. Fake cheese and soggy. Go and take your snooty staff with ya!

This place has a lot of potential, I think they need some fun artwork on the walls, more plants, more comfy seats, chill music, etc. Think central perk. It's a great location and the food and coffee are good (tasty cinnamon roll), but it's hard to justify the cost when the inside feels very drafty and lacking...