Dover’s new sourdough bakery aims to build community with fresh loaves
Peter Willette’s Our Daily Bread will open in Dover’s McConnell Center with sourdough loaves, soups and sandwiches, aiming to turn bread into a gathering place.
A sourdough bakery built around breakfast, lunch and a cloud-connected oven is moving into Dover’s McConnell Center, with Our Daily Bread set for a soft opening Monday, June 29. Owner Peter Willette said the shop is there to make fresh artisanal sourdough and to give the city another place to gather around food.
The menu leans hard into the bread itself. Willette plans loaves in flavors such as jalapeño cheddar, dried blueberry, sautéed onion and garlic, then uses them as the base for soups, sandwiches and toast. That setup matters for sourdough regulars because it treats the loaf as the main event, not a sidecar to pastries or coffee.
Willette has said the project is shaped by Catholic faith and a desire to build community, which gives the opening a different feel from a typical bakery launch. The name also lands with extra weight in Dover, where Our Daily Bread Food Pantry has long been part of the local landscape. In a city where bakery names and bread names already carry memory, this one arrives with a built-in sense of familiarity.
The location reinforces that idea. The McConnell Center is not a blank storefront but a city recreation hub that houses the Dover Community Senior Center, the Dover Indoor Pool and the Jenny Thompson Outdoor Pool. It also served as the temporary home for the Dover Public Library during renovation work in 2025. Putting a sourdough bakery in that setting makes it part of a daily civic routine, not just a retail transaction.
Dover has room for that kind of place. Harvey’s Bakery and Coffee Shop, a downtown institution dating to 1932, closed in 2025 and left a visible gap in the city’s bakery scene. Our Daily Bread is stepping into that opening with a sharper identity than most new shops: one focused on sourdough, breakfast and lunch, and a baking setup that blends old-school breadmaking with digital hardware.
For sourdough bakers, the appeal is obvious. Willette is not just selling loaves; he is building a bakery around them, in a building already used by seniors, swimmers and library patrons. That is how a bread shop becomes more than a stop for lunch. It becomes another reason people keep crossing the same threshold.
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