Little T: the Division baguette, early

Setting out along SE Division, we have sent more people to Little T Baker for “just a baguette” than we can count, and every one of them came back talking like they had discovered a new food group! They had not. They had discovered what a baguette is supposed to do on this stretch of Hosford-Abernethy: shatter a little, chew a lot, and make you rearrange the rest of the day around butter. Out of all the eastside loaves Portland bread fans have been wondering about, THIS is still the one.

Little t American Baker — the shop most of us just call Little T — opened on Division in 2008 in the glass-front space at 26th, and it immediately became the eastside answer to the westside institutions. Tim Healea founded it after nine years as head baker at Pearl Bakery, and the nickname is not a branding exercise. He earned “Little T” on the 2002 Bread Bakers Guild Team USA at the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in Paris, where the team took silver and needed a way to tell two Tims apart. In 2023 he handed the bakery to longtime head baker Dillon DeBauche, who had already spent nearly a decade on the bench and a stretch at Camas Country Mill. The baguette did not retire with the founder, and we are so glad!

Walk through those floor-to-ceiling windows and we can also see a modern, industrial room that still feels like a neighborhood bakery: concrete floors, wood shelves, a blackboard menu, and a counter lined with bread and pastry that is almost too tempting to walk past. Baguettes stand in the rack like a little forest of golden-brown sticks, the crust blistered and flour-dusted, and when you break one open the interior is creamy and airy in that way that makes you immediately look around for butter. It feels super Division — glass, light, a short line, people already deciding whether they also need a cookie — and we love that the shop never turned itself into a museum of 2008!

Healea used to talk about four words: flour, science, hands, and heart. That still reads as the shop. The breads lean on local grains milled at local mills. The pastry board rotates with the season and with whatever the bakers feel like chasing. Restaurants put the baguette on menus, and Providore Fine Foods carries the goods if you cannot get to Division, but none of that is a substitute for standing at this counter and taking one that came out that morning. If you only have one stop on the eastside, make it THIS baguette!

Then, if the case is still full, we look at the things Little T is actually known for besides the loaf. Seasonal fruit tarts sit under the glass with fruit that looks like it came from a farm, not a freezer. Chocolate chip cookies are the thing people who “don’t even like cookies” still take. Sally Lunn is the soft, rich brioche you want if the baguette is for dinner and you still want something for breakfast. There is also the salt slab, a focaccia-style flatbread slathered in olive oil and sea salt, and sandwiches that let the bread do the work. We do not write you a secret menu. We tell you to take the baguette first, then read the case like you mean it!

Know this before you go: the Division counter is the visit, and on weekends you need to go early, because baguettes go. We have watched the rack thin out while someone in line was still deciding between cookies, and that person left with cookies while we left with the thing we came for. If you get there and the baguettes are gone, ask when the next ones are due — historically this shop has treated the baguette as a twice-a-day bake in the old French baguette à l’ancienne style, the long skinny loaf people used to call out by name. We will not promise you a second bake on a given afternoon. We will tell you to ask, because the staff knows. Get your loaf, get your tart if one is left, and take the walk. Division will still be there. The baguette might not!

Want the short version? It’s on the Little T Baker page.