On two separate Sundays this year, the stretch of Cambridge Street between Fulkerson and Fifth stopped being a street. In June it filled with bakers laying out sourdough boules for blind judging. This fall it will close again, this time for smoke and ribs. Same three blocks, different season, same reason people show up. East Cambridge doesn't spread its food identity across the neighborhood so much as it stacks it onto one short run of pavement.
At the center of that stretch sits Elmendorf Baking Supplies, a bread and cheese shop at 594 Cambridge Street that Teddy and Alyssa Applebaum opened in 2018 inside a former Petsi Pies location. What started as a neighborhood baking supply counter is now the reason two of East Cambridge's biggest annual gatherings land on the same block, and the reason a well-regarded specialty shop from across the city line is packing up to move closer to it.
A Bakery That Outgrew Its Own Sidewalk
Before opening Elmendorf, the Applebaums worked at Formaggio Kitchen, the Huron Village cheese shop that later showed up as a vendor at their own festival. Four years ago, they and the East Cambridge Business Association turned the shop into the anchor of a street festival modeled on Paris's Grand Prix de la Baguette, the contest that has crowned the French capital's best baguette since 1997 and made the winner the official bread supplier to the French presidential residence for the year.
Le Grand Prix Elmendorf du Pain returned to Cambridge Street on June 14 for its fourth run, split into a professional sourdough boule category and an amateur seeded sandwich loaf category. Amateur entries stay capped at 50, in part because, as Applebaum explained, "judges can only taste so much bread before they revolt." The professional field grew this year too, pulling in 17 to 20 bakers, and the vendor lineup read like a map of the region's serious bread and cheese shops: Batifol, Formaggio Kitchen, Clear Flour Bread, Michette, Colette Bakery, Café Sauvage, Crêpe du Jour, Highland Butcher Shop, and Honeycomb Creamery, all crowded onto the same three blocks.
"It would be hard to imagine attendance increasing, yet somehow it does every year."
That's Applebaum describing a festival that now needs its own street closure permit on Cambridge Street between Fulkerson and Fifth, the same three blocks the neighborhood shuts down every fall for ribs.
The Somerville Shop Betting on This Exact Corner
The clearest sign that Elmendorf's corner has become a destination in its own right showed up this year as an address change, not a festival announcement. The Mushroom Shop, a specialty produce store that built a loyal following at the corner of Medford and Central Streets in Somerville, is relocating to 484 Cambridge Street, close enough to Elmendorf to share the same stretch of foot traffic, sometime between July and October of this year.
Owner Tyler Akabane built the Somerville shop's reputation on stock a chain grocery would never carry:
- Pawpaws sourced directly from area farms
- Pink lemons, sudachi, and yuzu
- Real wasabi root
- Tea from Cambridge's own Broken Cup Teahouse, which the shop was the first retailer to stock
In announcing the move, the team described the new East Cambridge address as room for "more rare finds, more seasonal things you won't see anywhere else." A shop with four years of Somerville loyalty built around a single corner store doesn't relocate for cheaper rent alone. It moves toward the customers already walking past Elmendorf on festival weekends, and toward a block that has spent four years training people to treat it as a food destination twice a year.
Sixteen Years of Closing the Same Block for Ribs
The bread festival is the newcomer. The block's older tradition is Smoke This Rib Fest, which the East Cambridge Business Association has run every fall for 16 years running, again on Cambridge Street between Fulkerson and Fifth. Last year's edition, held September 28, pulled in more than a dozen restaurants competing for two separate titles: a People's Choice award decided by anyone holding a Taste Ticket, and a judged award decided by a panel. The two didn't agree in 2024. Bambara Kitchen & Bar took the People's Choice vote, while the judges' panel gave the win to Amba Café & Rotisserie.
The festival runs on live sets from a rotating cast of local acts, past years have featured Albino Mbie, Jesse Ahern, Royer's One Man Band, and The Atwood's, plus a kids' craft table staffed by the East End House. Taste Tickets, which buy ten rib samples across the competing restaurants, sell out most years before the festival even starts. That's less a marketing problem than a sign of how tightly one Sunday on Cambridge Street can absorb demand.
The Water Two Blocks Away
Cambridge Street's food corridor doesn't operate in isolation. A short walk north puts you at Lechmere Canal Park, the 7.5-acre stretch of green running along both sides of the old Lechmere Canal, built in 1895 as a working seaport before the Charles River Dam Bridge cut it off from Boston Harbor in 1910. The park's current shape, weeping willows, sycamores, red maples, and a circular basin with a jet fountain, dates to the city's 1978 East Cambridge Riverfront plan and its designer, Carol Johnson.
This summer that same park did double duty as a watch party venue. The City of Cambridge used Canal Park and the stretch of First Street near Cambridge Street as two of the screening sites for the FIFA World Cup 26 final on July 19, with a Youth Soccer Fan Zone set up just outside CanalSide Food and Drink. Ten days earlier, on July 9, the quarterfinal watch party took over the Cambridge Crossing viewing area with an Afro-Caribbean Market on Jacobs Street. A neighborhood that already closes its main commercial street twice a year for food festivals spent this summer proving its parks could carry the same size crowd.
One Stretch, Doing All the Work
Zoom out and the pattern is specific enough to name. Elmendorf Baking Supplies sits at 594 Cambridge Street. The Mushroom Shop is landing at 484. Both addresses fall inside the same three blocks, Fulkerson to Fifth, that the ECBA closes every June for bread and every fall for ribs. That's not four unrelated updates about East Cambridge. It's one corridor absorbing an outside relocation, a four-year-old festival that keeps growing past its own organizers' expectations, and a 16-year-old festival that still sells out, all inside a walk shorter than the length of Lechmere Canal Park itself.
For anyone who already lives along Cambridge Street, that means fewer surprises about parking on festival Sundays and one more reason the walk to Elmendorf now ends somewhere worth stopping twice.
East Cambridge keeps proving that its identity isn't spread thin across the neighborhood, it's concentrated on a few blocks that do most of the work. If you're watching this corner of Cambridge for reasons beyond bread and ribs, Sandrine Deschaux + Co has spent two decades tracking exactly this kind of street-level change across East Cambridge and the rest of the city. Schedule a Consultation to talk through what's shifting on your block.
