Why Superba Food + Bread matters.
Superba Food + Bread is an inventive bakery-café where Venice's independent culinary character meets Paul Hibler's all-day neighborhood concept, an award-winning auto-shop conversion and a bread program conceived as the foundation of the restaurant.
Set along Lincoln Boulevard near Marco Place and just steps from Penmar Golf Course, the bakery-café occupies a converted auto body shop between the boulevard's commercial frontage and bungalow-lined residential streets stretching west toward Abbot Kinney Boulevard and the Pacific Ocean. Original roof structure and enlarged garage bays preserve the building's automotive proportions, as tall ceilings and broad openings give the former workshop an unusually porous relationship with the sidewalk and side patio. A glass-walled kitchen places production in direct view of the dining room, extending the bakery's working character into an open interior organized around communal tables and banquettes. The former garage openings connect indoor seating with outdoor gathering areas, including the recessed blue-tiled patio feature conceived as a neighborhood stoop. The result is a bakery-café whose workshop scale, visible production areas and open-air edges convert an industrial Lincoln Boulevard shell into a dining room closely connected to its surrounding Venice blocks.
What defines Superba Food + Bread.
Superba Food + Bread is best known for Paul Hibler's 2014 attempt to combine a bread bakery, pastry kitchen, coffee bar and full-service restaurant within a single all-day Venice operation. Hibler developed the project through American Gonzo Food Corporation after establishing Pitfire Artisan Pizza and opening Superba Snack Bar with chef Jason Neroni in 2012, making Food + Bread the second restaurant carrying the Superba name. A visit to Rose Bakery in Paris helped shape Hibler's conception of a place organized around bread and continuous daily use, and an early plan for a 1,800-square-foot site across Lincoln Boulevard was abandoned after his wife, real-estate broker Tiffany Rochelle, found the former auto body shop that became the restaurant's home. Hibler assembled Jason Travi, formerly of Fraiche and littlefork, as executive chef, with Neroni contributing as culinary consultant and former Le Pain Quotidien baker Jonathan Eng directing bread production. Former Michael Mina corporate pastry chef Lincoln Carson developed pastries and desserts, Handsome Coffee co-founder Tyler Wells constructed the coffee program around Stumptown beans, and Ashley Ragovin directed wine, giving the opening team distinct specialists across the operation's principal disciplines. A large Bassanina oven supported Eng's production of baguettes, boules, batards and other breads, with the Venice bakery conceived as a production hub supplying Hibler's other restaurants as well as its own dining room. Design, Bitches partners Catherine Johnson and Rebecca Rudolph led the architectural conversion with a larger team, retaining portions of the former shop as they rebuilt a property whose original slab was contaminated by automotive use and whose structure lacked a conventional foundation. Their 4,380-square-foot adaptive-reuse project received a 2014 AIA Los Angeles Restaurant Design Jury Award, one year after the practice received the same distinction for Superba Snack Bar. The opening team changed substantially during the first year, and by summer 2015 Kazuto Matsusaka, whose earlier kitchens included Spago, Chinois and Beacon, was cooking at the Venice restaurant with Vicki Fan. Hibler subsequently expanded Food + Bread beyond Venice, yet the Lincoln Boulevard restaurant remains the original realization of the concept that joined his restaurant development, specialist baking team and architectural reuse into one all-day operation.
Bread remains the clearest organizing principle across the food, moving from laminated morning pastry and toast into sandwiches and dishes that depend on the bakery rather than treating baked goods as an ancillary counter offering. Sourdough avocado toast builds richness through smashed avocado and soft egg against the fermented tang and toasted crust of the bread, with chile adding heat to the softer components. Superba's breakfast sandwich shifts the bakery toward a more substantial construction, placing egg, cheese and savory fillings between bread made for the restaurant's own service. Croissants bring lamination into the morning selection through thin alternating layers of dough and butter that separate under oven heat into a crisp exterior and tender interior. Cinnamon rolls move toward enriched dough, using butter, sugar and spice to produce a softer spiral structure distinct from the laminated pastry case. Chocolate chip cookies have become another enduring Superba preparation, using crisp edges and a softer center to extend the bakery beyond bread and breakfast pastry. Rotisserie cooking gives the savory kitchen a separate source of heat, allowing roasted poultry and vegetables to sit beside sandwiches, salads and bakery-driven plates across lunch and dinner. Superba Food + Bread draws its culinary character from that continuous movement between bread oven, pastry bench, coffee counter and savory kitchen, preserving the multi-part format Hibler built into the Venice restaurant from its beginning.
How Superba Food + Bread fits.
Superba Food + Bread works as the anchor for a Venice outing connecting the neighborhood's independent municipal history, an influential literary institution and the preservation of large-scale public art.
Begin at Beyond Baroque, housed in the former Venice City Hall, a Spanish Mission-style building designed by architects Garrett and Bixby and opened in 1907 during Venice's two decades as an independent municipality. Los Angeles annexed Venice in 1925, ending the building's original governmental purpose, and Beyond Baroque subsequently turned the former city hall into a literary arts center associated with generations of poets, writers, musicians and artists. The institution was founded in 1968, developed a publishing program and extensive archive, and became closely associated with writers including Wanda Coleman, whose work helped define Los Angeles poetry far beyond Venice. Continue to SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center founded in 1976 by muralist Judy Baca, filmmaker Donna Deitch and artist Christina Schlesinger to support public art and preserve the cultural histories carried through it. SPARC occupies Venice's former police station, an Art Deco civic building dating to 1929-1930 whose reinforced-concrete exterior incorporates Egyptian Revival relief panels above recessed metal windows. Baca subsequently directed The Great Wall of Los Angeles, an expansive mural developed with hundreds of young participants and artists along the Tujunga Wash, making SPARC inseparable from one of the country's most ambitious community mural projects. Conclude at Venice Heritage Museum, created from the Venice Heritage Foundation's 2008 effort to build a permanent institution devoted to the neighborhood's history. Years of pop-up exhibitions preceded a 2021 capital campaign that raised more than $300,000 for a physical home and accessible archives, and the museum opened to the public in 2024 before moving to Westminster Park in March 2026. Its collections and exhibitions preserve subjects ranging from Abbot Kinney's early resort city to the canal festivals, Japanese American wartime removal and vanished pieces of the beachfront built environment. The progression moves from Venice's former city hall and its reinvention as a literary center through Baca's public-art institution in the former police station and culminates in a museum created specifically to preserve Venice history, connecting municipal independence, cultural production and community memory across the neighborhood.
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