Dutch Maid Bakery & Cafe — Restaurant in Tracy City

This will be a very difficult review to write as I really wanted to love this bakery. My wife and I drove 2 hours on Saturday Jan 25th to visit. It is a quaint small town and the bakery was easy to find with plenty of parking. Upon first entry it looks like an amazing small town bakery. The decor was antique and there were plenty of baked goods to choose from. The lady at the counter was very pleasant and friendly.

In fairness, the town of Tracy City owes its economy primarily to the state parks and outdoor recreation in the area. January is a bad time in this respect and is definitely “off season.”

Cream Horn, exactly what I expected. The pastry was fresh and flaky. The cream was fairly bland but acceptable. It had a chocolate coating on each end. It had small dollops of cream and drizzle of chocolate as a decoration on top. Good but not great.

Eclair, ugh! It had a proper pate a choux shell. It was cut for the filling rather than piped in. It had the same chocolate as on the cream horn. The biggest problem is they didn’t fill it with Creme Patissiere, they used the same bland whipped cream as in the cream horn. It ended up being the exact same taste as the cream horn.

Cannoli, really, again? I am not sure that they made the cannoli shell in house. It was WRONG! It was not a fried crispy cannoli shell. It was somewhat flaky and baked. The Cannoli was pre-filled which caused the bottom of the shell to be very soft. I expected to get a nice smooth ricotta filling. What I got was yet again, the exact same bland whipped cream as in the cream horn. Very disappointing. All three, cream horn, eclair and Cannoli tasted exactly the same.

Lemon square, yeah, no. From the picture I uploaded you can zoom in and see the problem. The pastry was fresh and flaky. The filling was … ugh, the exact same whipped cream filling as the other previous three products. Look closely and you can see little bits of lemon on top. They did the same thing with the raspberry square (which we did not purchase), filled with whipped cream and topped with a little amount of raspberry on top.

Chocolate chip cookie, I’m lost. From the picture you can IMMEDIATELY identify the problemS. It is very blonde and had zero flavor. I did not taste vanilla at all. I am not sure that they even used brown sugar in this cookie. Biggest issue, as you can see in the picture, it had 2 CHOCOLATE CHIPS in the whole cookie. My wife claims that there was a 3rd hiding but I never saw it.

Tennessee Whiskey cake, did we forget something? This Chocolate cake was actually pretty fresh and quite a good chocolate cake. BUT, there was ZERO Jack Daniels flavor what-so-ever! I asked the lady at the counter about the lack of Jack Daniels flavor and she told me that all of the alcohol cooks off during baking. Yea, no, wrong. This cake was a good chocolate cake, it was a bad Tennessee Whiskey cake.

Turnovers, ok. My wife got the cream cheese and I got the apple. My wife said that the cream cheese turnover was very good. The apple turnover had a fresh flaky pastry and was very good as well. However, there was only a very small amount of filling. It was just a thin strip. Good yes, good value no.

Rosemary and Olive Oil Bread. I sliced this loaf when we got back home for a quick snack. Rosemary was mild but it was definitely there. Olive oil, zippo. I did not taste any at all. If they label properly you will see that olive oil, being the last on the ingredient label, had the smallest amount incorporated. This explains why I didn’t taste it. However, taste aside, it was soooooo dry. The pic of the bread shows the dryness along the bottom and edges the most.

Cinnamon pull-apart bread. It was absolutely horrible. The best way to describe it was eating a sawdust brick. It was stale and hard. My best guess is that it was several weeks old. It was completely inedible.

Now, the lady at the front desk did tell us that they had frozen pipes AND that their head baker was out. All in all, not a good experience. My two cents, take it for...

Itching for a road trip, we made the drive up to sample Dutch Maid Bakery and walk around nearby Sewanee. They're still open for carry out, so we donned our masks and headed inside.

The decor is quaint and almost a little kitschy. The bakery has been open for a really long time, which is pretty cool. During non Covid times you can tour the inside a bit and see the industrial sized baking machines and such. I'm pretty sure they do cafe-type lunches (sandwiches, soups, etc), but for now offerings seem limited to baked goods. There was a very large selection available at around 2 PM on a Saturday. The service was friendly and pleasant and prepared to answer any questions. Some kind of cake was left out to sample, but I didn't go there - can't be too careful.

We got two chocolate chip cookies, a black and white cookie, a lemon bar, and a mini sourdough loaf to try out. Overall, nothing was horrible or super objectionable, but simultaneously nothing really wowed me, either. The chocolate chip cookies were dry and crunchy and didn't have a ton of chocolate chips or brown sugar flavor like I prefer. The black and white cookie wasn't as dry. I'd never had a black and white cookie before, so I'm not sure what I got was a good or bad example of the dessert. It had a more cake like base than other cookies, with sort of waxy icing on top. The vanilla icing wasn't very flavorful, but the chocolate was okay. This was primarily a texture-based experience, as no flavors really stood out.

The lemon bar was definitely the highlight. Not too sweet, not too tart, pleasantly gooey lemon topping and crumbly bottom. I enjoyed that and would get it again. The sourdough was just alright; I prefer my sourdough to be more sour and less sweet, as this loaf tasted much like regular white bread you'd get at the store. The texture of it was nice though, soft and chewy.

Overall, I probably wouldn't go out of my way to return, but if you're passing through, this bakery might be worth a stop for a fun diversion and...

This place came highly recommended and has great reviews. But my family didn’t have that kind of experience unfortunately. Positive: I felt the service was very good, they went above and beyond for us. Here are my complaints: We came for breakfast and honestly the food wasn’t very good (except for the cinnamon roll which was delicious). We got cheese omelettes and breakfast sandwiches…none of us finished our food even though the portion size wasn’t enormous. As I looked around the place, they had old and uncleared food in the restaurant (dishes and food from previous customers who had left), bakery area (lots of old egg shells and flour sitting out), and in the dining hall (wilted and dried salad stuck to a bowl, used salad dressings sitting out, a half eaten desert on a plate left sitting out). There was clutter everywhere on the floors from cleaning supplies to boxes of baking supplies to decorations that were out of season. The staff touted their history (oldest bakery in TN) and their upcoming gig (Danish pastries for a movie shoot in Nashville), but the fact was we didn’t buy anything from the bakery because we were grossed out by the food and the lack of cleanliness. With a little bit of cleaning up and work on their recipes, it could be...