OPUS Bakehouse opens in La Crosse, bringing sourdough to Market Street

OPUS Bakehouse opened at 1513 Market Street in La Crosse after a soft opening the week before, bringing Trevor Brown’s long-running baking project into a storefront built to feel like part of daily neighborhood life. The bakery’s new home is more than a sales counter. It is also a production site for bread and pastries bound for OPUS’s Onalaska location, a sign that the Market Street shop was designed as both an expansion and a working node in the business.

Brown said the project took about two years to bring to life, and the location was chosen to fit a broader idea of light commerce returning to residential streets. He wanted a bakery people could reach on foot, by bike, by skate or even on rollerblades, which fits the way sourdough shops often become part of a route rather than a special trip. That approach gives OPUS a stronger neighborhood identity than a strip-mall bakery: it is meant to be passed, entered, revisited and folded into the rhythm of the block.

The menu backs up that positioning. OPUS says it makes naturally leavened products from organic, locally grown ingredients, with a seasonally driven lineup that changes weekly. The shop now offers breads, pastries and sandwiches, while the bakery’s own site tells customers to arrive early because popular items sell out fast. That sell-out-early model matched the opening-day response, when local coverage described a large crowd and most pastries disappearing within the first hour.

The storefront also reflects the scale of a bakery that grew out of a much smaller operation. Brown and co-owner Sarah Brown had outgrown their 450-square-foot Onalaska space, and the new Market Street site gave the business room to serve both a retail crowd and the broader production side of the operation. The Onalaska shop is temporarily closed while the La Crosse location is open, with current hours Wednesday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The building itself carries the neighborhood story further back. A Habitat for Humanity La Crosse feature described the site at 1513 Market Street as part of a redevelopment plan that included an apartment for the property owners and storefront space for OPUS Bakehouse, and said materials from a late-19th-century house on the lot were salvaged before redevelopment. La Crosse officials later approved a reduced one-story cafe and bakery plan after a zoning change request removed the second-floor residential space. Near Weigent Park and businesses like artPOP and Twinkle & Twine Design, the bakery lands in a corridor that already behaves like a neighborhood destination, which is exactly the kind of place Brown described when he called La Crosse “ripe for more” third places.