The Sour Boule expands to Willow Park with second location

The Sour Boule is heading to Willow Park with a second location at 280 Willow Bend Drive, a clear sign that its sourdough-first sandwich model has outgrown one Fort Worth cafe. The bakery, known for scratch-made sandwiches, bagels, pastries and homemade pickles, said the new site is still under construction while it starts hiring front-of-house baristas and back-of-house production staff.

That kind of staffing push matters. The original cafe opened in 2023 and found enough traction fast enough to justify moving into a larger nearby space, rather than staying a one-shop neighborhood stop. Alexis Misner founded The Sour Boule after selling sourdough bread and cookies under the name Misner Family Farms at local farmers markets, and the first cafe was planned for 3701 Southwest Blvd. in southwest Fort Worth, about 1,300 square feet with indoor and patio seating and coffee from Fort Worth-based Ostara Coffee Roasters.

The menu shows why the concept travels. The Sour Boule is built around real ingredients, house-made meats and naturally fermented bread, and its name ties sourdough to the French boule, a round rustic loaf. That identity runs through breakfast items like sourdough pancakes, sourdough bagels and a sourdough breakfast sandwich, then carries into lunch with The Original, The Spicy Sour Boule, The One With Cranberry, I Got Nothin', The Toxic Boule, Phoebe's Garden and Chandler's Choice. This is not a bakery bolting sandwiches onto the side. It is a sourdough-centered cafe that uses bread as the main event.

That distinction is what makes the Willow Park expansion interesting beyond one local opening. A 2024 Fort Worth Report story on independent eateries expanding in response to customer demand already pointed to The Sour Boule as part of a broader pattern of local spots adding capacity to keep up with growing appetites. For sourdough, that is the market signal: customers are not just buying loaves to take home, they are showing up for repeated lunch traffic, breakfast service and a menu that makes fermentation feel everyday, not special occasion.

The Sour Boule started with an obsession with real sourdough bread and a slower-food philosophy built on time, temperature and patience. Willow Park shows how that approach scales: not as a niche bakery, but as a neighborhood sandwich destination with enough pull to justify a second storefront.