Continental Bakery

In Birmingham, Alabama’s English Village shopping district, Continental Bakery has built its reputation on hand-shaped, made-from-scratch breads and pastries in the European tradition. The bakery describes itself as a quaint European style bakery and coffee shop, and its bread program follows through on that description: loaves are shaped by hand and baked daily by artisan bakers using quality ingredients, without shortcuts toward mass production.

The bread menu is extensive and organized by style. Wild yeast and white sourdoughs are sold as full two-kilogram boules or in half and quarter portions, running from eight to twenty-one dollars depending on size. French-style breads include a restaurant baguette, a Parisian baguette priced at $5.00, an epi, and a peasant loaf, most priced between five and eight dollars. Olive-studded boules like the kalamata boule at $7.75, a Jewish rye, and a braided challah at $9.00 round out the specialty section, while sandwich breads like white, whole wheat, and a four-seed loaf serve the more everyday end of the case.

Beyond the daily bread lineup, Continental Bakery also bakes brioche buns in hoagie, hamburger, and slider sizes for restaurants and home cooks buying in bulk, along with butterflake rolls and a vegan yeast roll option. That range signals a bakery that serves both walk-in customers picking up a loaf for dinner and businesses ordering buns by the dozen for their own kitchens, a wholesale-facing side of the business that runs alongside the retail counter.

Continental Bakery keeps some of the longest hours of any bakery in the city, open seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. That schedule makes it a viable stop well into the evening, not just a morning bread run, and it sets the shop apart from the more limited weekday-only hours common at smaller Birmingham bakeries. The full-week, twelve-hour schedule also means the bakery can serve as a coffee shop stop later in the day, not just a place to grab bread before an early dinner.

The bakery offers both online ordering and phone orders, though larger or custom items generally require forty-eight hours of advance notice through the online system. Customers who need something sooner are encouraged to call the shop directly at 205-870-5584 to check same-day availability and arrange payment. Both pickup and delivery are offered, giving visitors flexibility depending on how they want to get their bread home.

Set in English Village, a small, walkable retail strip in Birmingham, Continental Bakery fits naturally into an afternoon spent browsing the surrounding shops. Its long daily hours and wide bread selection, from a simple sandwich loaf to a full two-kilogram sourdough boule, make it one of the more dependable bakery stops in the city for anyone looking for something more substantial than a single pastry.

The bread terminology on the menu is worth knowing before ordering. A boule is a round, free-form loaf, the classic shape behind the shop’s wild yeast and white sourdoughs. An epi takes a baguette and cuts it into a wheat-stalk pattern before baking, which lets customers pull off individual rolls by hand rather than slicing a whole loaf. A peasant loaf is a rustic, everyday round bread, simpler than the specialty boules but still hand-shaped like the rest of the case. Because the bakery is locally owned and offers both takeout and delivery, visitors have some flexibility in how they get any of these loaves home, whether that means walking out with a warm baguette or scheduling a delivery for a two-kilogram boule that would be awkward to carry through English Village on foot. The brioche buns, sold in hoagie, hamburger, and slider sizes, are built specifically for other kitchens as much as for home cooks, so a restaurant across town could plausibly be serving a burger on a Continental Bakery bun without a customer ever knowing the bread came from English Village.