The noisy crowd on the Birmingham sidewalk turns reverent as they pass through Last Call Baking Company’s dusty-pink door, bound for a case stacked with croissants baked until they turn a deep shade of mahogany. Carrying a cup of coffee from up the street, I follow. As the morning line shrinks and the stock of pastries does, too, we ask one another, Are they out of coffee scrolls? How many cheese biscuits are left?
Ralph Wooten and his wife are on their way to his chemotherapy appointment at nearby UAB Medical Center. “I wanted to start my day with a treat,” he tells me, gesturing to a brown paper bag stamped with Last Call’s neo-Gothic logo and stuffed with a caramel-domed and sea salt–sprinkled kouign-amann, a pastry of traditional French origin. A look of joy lights his face.
Open since 2022, set on a redeveloped block on downtown’s northern edge in the shadow of a graffiti-tagged expressway overpass, Last Call anchors a three-storefront strip of businesses that showcase everyday excellence and youthful obsession. At the top of the block, June Coffee, with its slatted wood walls, looks like it was put together by a cabinetmaker. Owner Jimmy Truong and his crew get the details right. Cortados come in faceted glasses that feel heavy in the hand. A small pastry case tucked beneath the counter displays a subset of Last Call’s best. (When the bakery’s line is daunting, June sometimes provides a backdoor path to a great croissant.)
Zephyr Barber, in the middle, opens early to catch business its neighbors attract. Jon Funderburk, whose grandfather worked this block when it was home to Birmingham Poultry and Egg, mans the chair closest to the window. Doctors in blue scrubs, on the back end of overnight shifts, come to see him for straight-razor shaves. Lawyers in gray suits arrive for trims and walk away with cups of coffee and boxes of croissants.
Both June and Zephyr hum with good energy, but Last Call is the dynamo. Inside the concrete-floored space, two proofing boxes and two narrow refrigerators line the far wall. A battleship-gray stand mixer squats alongside, looking like a rescue from a grade school cafeteria kitchen. The vibe is so stripped-down it might as well be punk. So is the attitude. When Last Call sells out, it closes. Sometimes that happens just a couple of hours after opening.
At the center of the room, sticks of butter rise from an oversize wooden table like toy building blocks. Chanah Willis, the elaborately tattooed, twenty-eight-year-old proprietor, stands before that table. Wrapped in a black apron, a black-and-white kerchief on her head, she shapes dough that fermented for twenty-four hours before her crew folded it layer atop buttery layer, employing a technique bakers call lamination.
Willis grew up in Chelsea, thirty minutes south of Birmingham. Her mother is a hobbyist painter. Her father, a practicing Christian with a Jewish background, is a musician and works at a theology school. As a child, Willis traveled with him when he staged Passover seders at Baptist churches in Alabama towns such as Pell City and Gadsden.
Her calling came early. By age ten she was rolling out choux pastry in the family kitchen. Strawberry-stuffed cream puffs came next. Before returning to pastry, she studied art and worked as a bartender. (Last Call’s name gestures to those late nights slinging drinks.)
On this Tuesday morning, Willis is making coffee scrolls, crenellated rounds iced with a slurry of coffee and sugar. Three or four people usually work alongside her. Today, Jonathan Henderson, an ardent hiker, rolls triangles of gleaming dough around batons of chocolate. Behind the counter, Jaclyn Robbins, who also sings in the band Trooper, greets all with charm. “How is your morning so far?” she asks a young mother in black leather pushing a baby carriage.
Occasional specials, inspired by Willis’s curiosities, dot the menu, including mochi waffles, milk bread doughnuts, and matcha olive oil cake. Most show up on weekends, when the sidewalk wait can stretch to thirty minutes. But the core menu, available six days a week, is the true draw. Her cinnamon rolls tower in the case like golden ziggurats. High-shouldered Danish, with berries and cream cheese at center, recall jewel boxes. Tasting of sharp cheddar and salt and spiked with hot sauce, her biscuits are downy on the inside and come wrapped in a shell as crisp as an Italian frico.
Croissants, which Last Call serves in plain, ham-and-cheese, chocolate, and almond varieties, are Willis’s ongoing obsession. (After eight visits over the past two years, it’s one I share.) To explain, she gets her phone out to scroll through the research and development photos she takes of croissants, cut in half to reveal the inner layers.
“A great croissant should have a pull to the crumb at the center,” she tells me, zooming in on an image. “And the interior should explode out from that center.” What begins as an explanation quickly becomes a passionate recitation of the promise Willis makes to each customer who stands in line. “When you bite,” she says, “the inside should be soft like an angel’s hair, and the outside should shatter like shrapnel.”
Plus: Gone Sourdough
An Alabama couple’s bread infatuation
Small bakeries now flourish across the South, fueled by earnest intent and hard work. From their storefront, opened last April in downtown Opelika, Alabama, near the college town of Auburn, Stinson Breads founders Matthew and Anna Claire Stinson turn out bourbon coffee twists and, most important, genuinely sour loaves of sourdough that have become the daily bread for this neck of the state.
