Setting Smackdown – Coffee Shop vs. Bakery!
It’s a weekend morning, and you have time to take it slow. Get yourself a treat. And maybe… meet someone special?
But where do you think you might find your sweet-as-candy sugar pie? In the land of milk and honey, where we go nuts for donuts and are, uh, cross for croissants, because we like big bundts and we cannot lie, cake it until you make it at… A BAKERY!!!!
We may expect bakers to bake love, not war, but remember, if they couldn’t take the heat, they wouldn’t be in the kitchen! In Lucy Parker’s Battle Royal, owners of rival bakeries got off to a bad start on a reality show and are now co-judges competing to make a royal wedding cake. Reality-TV vet Jada, of Jamie Wesley’s Fake It Till You Bake It, and NFL-player-turned-baker Donovan also thrive on a challenge. And obviously nobody lives for danger quite like Jennifer Sylvester, the Banana Cake Queen who seizes the chance to blackmail Cletus Winston – Cletus Winston! – in Beard Science.
But bakeries can also be cozy, not competitive. In The Ultimate Pi Day Party by Jackie Lau, tech exec Josh Yu hires Sarah Winters to cater a pie-themed pi day celebration to help reforge Josh’s relationship with his estranged math teacher father. A workaholic baker meets the single mother of her dreams in The Secret Ingredient by 
K.D. Fisher. In Gimme Some Sugar, Molly Harper’s heroine Lucy finds her hero while delivering, of all things, a cake shaped like a penis.
In terms of sheer numbers, it’s not exactly Starbucks on every corner in Romancelandia – far more books are set in bakeries than in coffee shops. But when it comes to DIKs, the bakeries are in for a brewed awakening: coffee shops outnumber them 10 DIKs to 7! There’s no doubt about it: you can find a whole latte love at… A COFFEE SHOP!
A lot of happy cup-ples have had their “meet cute” over a cup. Often, for one of them, a coffee shop is the daily grind. In Irene Hannon’s Blackberry Beach, an incognito actress meets the owner of the local coffee shop; in Heidi Cullinan’s The Professor’s Green Card Marriage, it’s a barista and professor; in Elizabeth Rolls’ A Marriage of Equals, it’s the proprietor and a lord’s man of business. B.G. Thomas’s Hound Dog & Bean features an owner who even takes a punch to spare a customer (who’s being harassed for rejecting a bully’s application to adopt a dog).
Getting deja brew from all of these coffee shop owners? There are other ways to stir things up! Sarah Mayberry has two coffee DIKs with different protagonists: Must Love Coffee, where two customers strike up a teasing rivalry over which of them is the best customer, and Sweetheart, where the hero owns a roastery. Two customers also meet at a shop in Mr. Hotshot CEO by Jackie Lau – a wealthy CEO struggling with depression meets a heroine enjoying her latte and asks for her advice on keeping the roast the only thing around that’s dark.
And this isn’t all! Please check out our coffee and bakery tags for further beloved reads with these locations!
So what do you think? Can the bakers show that baristas are drips? Or will the coffee shops make the bakeries eat humble pie? Vote your opinion here!
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I have to go with bakery settings because I love Laura Florand’s Amour et Chocolat series set in Paris with patisseries and chocolatiers.
Also, I love the choices you made in the post Caroline!
My first reads – and favorite books – by Annabeth Albert is her Portland Heat books with both coffee cart, coffee shop and bakery related settings.
I just finished Wrapped Together. I’ve read most of the books in the series and have enjoyed them.
I love that series too!
The only bakeries I know don’t have seating areas. There are a few Cafes in my area that do specialty baking, but also serve coffee and a couple of places serve breakfast and lunch items as well. So if I had my pick of places to set a story, it would be a place like Dulce Cafe, a small but incredible specialty bakery, that also has breakfast and lunch and serves coffee drinks.
Most bakeries in the UK, in my experience, are places you go to buy bread and cakes – not many of them have seating areas. A major chain called Greggs is one of the few that does, but after a recent refit, my local branch is no longer selling bread or rolls, and seems to be concentrating on its take away/sit in business of coffee, sandwiches and cakes. In that respect, it’s more like a coffee shop; the two other local bakeries are places you go to buy bread and other stuff to take away; one of them does to-go drinks, but that’s it. If you want to sit down with your caffeine, a coffee shop is pretty much the only option here.
If the story is set in the UK, then based on what I see around me in the vast “middleness” of England where I live, coffee shops far out-number bakeries so a British author would be more likely to set a decent romance in a coffee shop or cafe or, best of all, in an old-fashioned tea room – my personal favourite. It may be different in London, which is vastly multi-cultural, thus in terms of food, but I rarely visit. Sadly, when I spent six months living in Kyiv some years ago, there were the most divine patisserie shops and I could not bring myself to walk by them without a quick purchase.
Good point! That is something I’ve not found/read yet – a book in which one of the characters owns or does work related to a tea room. And yet it is one of my favorite stops to make when I’m in Canada or the UK, and will be on my list if I ever make it to Asia.