Tartine is a neighborhood bakery and café at the intersection of 18th and Guerrero streets, near the geographical center of San Francisco, just a few blocks away from the Spanish mission church of Saint Francis, completed in 1791. The bakery dates back to only 2002, the year my husband, Chad Robertson, and I moved into the neighborhood. We had been married and baking together for nearly ten years, most of them spent in the country, and it was time to move our life and our business back to the city, to a neighborhood that was full of diversions and diversity, with a busy hum and a quirky look, where live new music was never far away.We named our bakery Tartine because the bread Chad bakes is central to our enterprise, and the French tartine is a piece of bread—any size, sliced or torn, grilled or not—on which something is spread:usually a little jam and butter for an everyday breakfast, but also such things as tomatoes, goat cheese, and olive oil for a Provençal picnic or some smoked eel for a fisherman’s lunch.