By Caroline Roosevelt
Contributing Writer

On a recent misty Saturday morning, I noticed the usual line outside of the door of the old Brown Derby Restaurant in Toughkenamon and hauled it to the parking lot behind the building. It was 9:57 a.m. and so I had a few minutes waiting in line with more than one dozen other customers, who were anxiously awaiting their turn to pick up their order.

The business, which displays a “Sorry We Are Closed” outside near its exterior logo throughout the week, is called Blacklab Breads. I had stalked it for months, driving by en route to my children’s daycare center, and I wondered when I would be able to pop in and explore. I wrestled whether to try to catch them during business hours – Saturdays and Sundays only - or find a way to reach them beforehand. As it turns out, Blacklab Breads does not have a business phone number, so when I arrived there for the first time, my intention was to solve a nagging mystery of curiosity about a bakery that has been in Toughkenamon since 2023 - and also drive away with something delicious.

“Where did you hear about Blacklab?” I asked the couple in front of me. “Word of mouth!” they replied.

“And what would be the thing to order?” I asked. Without hesitation, the couple responded, “Get the Maritozzi (fluffy brioche rolls filled with whipped cream and dusted with confectioners' sugar), but you’ll have to order more than one because you’ll want more.”

At precisely 10:00 a.m., the two “Closed” signs disappeared from the front window, owner Barry Ciarrocchi unlocked the door and we all filed in like members of a congregation, which I found profoundly apt, given that the was a poster of Chef Anthony Bourdain – or Saint Anthony, as he was depicted – that appeared next to the chalkboard menu filled with that day’s offerings.

Ciarrocchi had just finished the night shift, preparing the orders for this morning. Joined by his wife, Sandy, his son, Alexander and the Blacklab staff, he usually arrives at the bakery at midnight on Saturday mornings and works all night to prepare a variety of heaping menu offerings that range from breads to sweets to sandwiches, a veritable feast that customers point to on the shelves and take home with them.

While the gathering throng kept arriving, I met with Ciarrocchi in the back of the bakery, where he and his crew were already preparing batches for Sunday’s opening.

“We are here Monday through Sunday deciding the menu, the type of sandwiches we’ll make and the meat and the bread that will go with them,” he said. “We will also decide how many baguettes and how much sourdough we should make for the following weekend. We also make most everything by scratch. For instance, we roast the meat for our roast beef sandwiches on site, then shave it down and prepare the cole slaw that comes with it.

“When we make our hummus, we dry the chickpeas here, use lemons, extra virgin olive oil, and then we toast the sesame seeds to make our own tahini.”

Ciarrocchi told me that he started his career as a pastry chef but got sick of the smell of melted chocolate. 

“I would smell like chocolate when I got home, and it was all under my fingernails, so I started fooling around with making bread, and then started working at a bakery as a supervisor at Baker Street in Philadelphia,” said Ciarrocchi, whose previous Blacklab Breads was located in the Little Italy section of Wilmington. “Then I supervised at Metropolitan Bakery for about four years, and then I decided I wanted to do it on my own and do it the way I want to do it. Then we found this place right after the pandemic around 2023.”

Another couple in line informed me that Black Lab has the best cannoli. 

“They’re better than Termini in Philadelphia!” they said which, if you have any knowledge of the reptation of the world-renowned bakery’s two locations in Philadelphia, is quite a compliment. Blacklab Breads secures their ricotta from Fiero M. & Sons, a cheese purveyor Wilmington, and then makes their own light and crunchy shells at the bakery. In addition to the sweets, Ciarrocchi pointed out the seeded rye, sourdough, Italian loafs and the baguettes and epi baguettes that rested fresh and aromatic on the shelves, as well as bagels, tomato pies and ciabatta.

“How did you come up with the name Blacklab Breads?” I ask Barry as I wrapped up my interview. 

“It comes from the history of alchemy, in purifying elements in their search for gold,” he said. As further explanation, In alchemy, blackness means putrefaction or decomposition. Many alchemists believed that as a first step in the pathway to the philosopher’s stone, all alchemical ingredients had to be cleansed and cooked extensively to a uniform black matter. In analytical psychology, the term became a metaphor for “the dark night of the soul, when an individual confronts the shadow within.”

Either explanation works for me, but Blacklab Breads definitely found gold with the sourdough boule, the tomato pie, and the maritozzi I brought home to my very grateful family. This is a magical mystery solved, and one bakery that I will be working into my future weekend routine.

Blacklab Breads is located at 1470 Baltimore Pike in Toughkenamon and is open on Saturdays and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Parking is at the rear of the bakery. To learn more and learn about its weekly list of baked goods, sandwiches and more, visit them on Facebook.