You know how you might see one ant — a lone ant — crawling around on your cupboard shelf? And once you notice the lone ant, your eyes dial in, scanning the cupboard shelf until they land on a second ant. Suddenly, there are more and more ants the more you look, climbing over one another and toting around little salt crystals. Within just a few seconds, you’ve gone from having a supposedly ant-free cupboard to hosting a small colony in your Goldfish bag.

That’s sort of what the Tatte-ification of D.C. feels like.

The Boston-based bakery chain Tatte — pronounced like “latte,” as stated in looping cursive on its coffee cups — has opened 10 locations in the D.C. region in just under three years, with forthcoming locations in Reston and Alexandria.

Despite its ubiquity in D.C.’s northwest quadrant, Tatte isn’t actually a local company. The first Tatte opened in Boston in 2007, founded by the pastry chef Tzurit Or. Or went on to open 15 locations in Massachusetts as the company’s CEO — until the summer of 2020.

At that time, multiple employees criticized Or’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests — calling the company’s support only Instagram-deep — and called out the companies’ all-white executive team for ignoring employees’ reports of racism and sexism. Or stepped down as CEO to focus on “more creative” aspects of the company, while Chuck Chapman, a former Panera Bread executive, moved into the CEO role.

The Panera connection is not a coincidence; quite the opposite! Another Panera Bread guy, the founder of the bread bowl empire himself, Ron Shaich, is Tatte’s lead investor, and he literally wants to put one on every block. In 2019, Shaich said as much to Boston Magazine, adding that he wants to “upset the applecart of our apathetic dining habits by providing high-quality, soul-satisfying alternatives to fast food, in settings that feel more like Parisian patisseries than elementary school cafeterias.”

Putting aside that nothing has felt more to me like a cafeteria (in an endearing way) and less like a Parisian patisserie than Panera Bread, I still reached out to Tatte to ask why they’ve chosen to grow so rapidly in the D.C.-area. I also asked what commitments they’ve made to Black employees or to increasing diversity on the company’s executive team since 2020, but I did not hear back on either question.

Most of the D.C. Tattes are within a mile of another one, with some even mere blocks apart. As one WAMU reporter eloquently put it: you can’t throw a stone in D.C. without hitting a Tatte. “Explosion” feels like too dramatic a word to describe the brand’s rapid D.C. expansion; but it did sort of seem like one day, many of the city’s vacant storefronts suddenly bore the brand’s deliberately quaint, serifed name.

So despite having but one life on this earth, I spent one whole day attempting to visit every D.C.-area Tatte location, in search of an answer to a question I’m not really sure I fully baked before embarking on my mission. For one, I wanted to prove just how pervasive Tatte’s presence is by seeing how quickly I could bop between them, but I also wanted to know, conceptually speaking — what’s the deal with Tatte? Why are there so many? Is every vacant shop in the Northwest quadrant bound to be renovated in black and white tile, exposed ventilation, and minimalist wooden furniture?

I did not find specific answers to those questions, because despite spending (spoiler) upwards of seven hours traversing between them and embedding with the Click Clack Class of laptop workers that inhabit them, there is simply nothing that interesting to say about Tatte that couldn’t be said about any of its ancestors or inevitable successors. If you build it (a cafe with wifi and lots of neutral tones, aesthetically suited for food porn-y photos of croissants and pretty lattes) they will come. And then I guess you keep building it?

Stop 1: Clarendon

9:40 a.m: I walk off the Metro and I am in Clarendon, which is a place I have never been in a literal sense, but somewhere I have been many times in a notional sense. In the six minutes it takes me to walk from the Metro to the Tatte, I pass: a Chipotle, a Cava, a Circa, a Framebridge store (which I didn’t know was a real thing outside of the Internet and podcast ads), a boutique veterinary office resembling something like a One Medical for pets, a Container Store, and a shop that sells ice cream made with liquid nitrogen.

Hilariously, there is a Le Pain Quotidien — which one could argue walked so Tatte could run — around the corner from the Tatte. Sometimes things make almost too much sense, and nowhere else in the world makes more sense to put a Tatte than this exact street.

9:46 a.m.: This Tatte is surprisingly crowded for a Friday morning. (I planned to arrive closer to 9 a.m., but thanks to my thoughtlessness and lack of geographical awareness, my commute included an accidental stop at the Pentagon.)

I walk inside, and it smells like a Bluestone Lane (which is essentially an Australian Tatte): sterile, plastic, and doughy all at once. It’s very bright and airy; everything is black, white, or a mid-century-modern-woody brown. The walls are tiled in black and white. The floors’ black-and-white tiles are laid into this interesting scallop pattern. The perimeter of the restaurant is lined with a mid-century-modern-rustic-woody brown bar wide enough to fit a laptop; similarly colored wooden stools surround the barista station. Larger tables sit in the back of the restaurant, where people appear to be enjoying a leisurely breakfast.

Beneath the high ceilings hang exposed ventilation ducts, and a wall cut-out peers into the kitchen. Outside, a large, L-shaped patio hugs the exterior of the building.

9:47: a.m.: I grab a menu and join the line to order, behind a trio of women whose ages I will not speculate on but seem to be old friends meeting up for breakfast. I’m a bit envious of them, because I realize I will be spending my time at Tattes alone, and I would love to be meeting up with my friends for breakfast.

As I am scanning the menu, a middle-aged man in a dry-fit exercise shirt with sunglasses hung around his neck (maybe just back from a run) joins the line behind me, and looks longingly at the lavish pastry display before us, containing but not limited to: tea cakes, croissants, kouign-amann, morning buns, danishes, palmiers, cheese bourekas, and turnovers.

“They all look so good,” he says to no one in particular, before adding, “it’s too much,” with a defeated sigh.

I end up picking the muesli. (Tatte loyalists may say this was the wrong choice, and while I don’t have to justify my breakfast preferences to anyone: it was one of those days where even the thought of an egg made my stomach flip, admittedly on account of me being mildly hungover.)

As I’m paying for my muesli and small iced latte, I hear one of the women in the trio lamenting the fact that she’s already consumed a certain amount of calories that day, and that this was complicating her breakfast choice. I no longer envy their hangout.

9:53 a.m.: I’m sitting at a table outside with my cup of muesli and latte ($13.75 before tip), watching people in athleisure come and go with their takeout coffees and croissants. One woman walks up to greet one of her tablemates sitting outside, and as she goes in for a hug, chirps “you look so unbothered!” And that’s sort of the vibe of this Tatte. Everyone looks like they might go shopping, or golfing, or to a fitness class at some point today, but they’re in no rush.

10:15: A woman is hovering politely next to my table with her bags and coffee — it’s that crowded! — and given that what I am doing is the opposite of important and I have nine more Tattes to hit, I gather my things and leave.

Stop 2: Bethesda

11:00 a.m.: It’s somewhere between getting on the Metro at Clarendon and getting off the Metro at Bethesda that I stop having fun and start having regrets, which is really not a good place for me to be mentally, considering I have nine Tattes to go before I sleep. I try to focus on really thinking HARD about some things to say about these Tattes, because that definitely is a worthwhile way to use this one brain I’ve been given.

11:05 a.m.: The vibe of the Bethesda Tatte is decidedly more chaotic. I didn’t realize how quiet it was at the Clarendon stop until I walked into this one, where everyone is engaged in a conversation either IRL, over Zoom, or on the phone. While in Clarendon it looked like the clientele had absolutely nowhere to be, everyone at the Bethesda spot looks as though they have very important places to be and this Tatte is just a blip in the agenda of their very important day. In other words, this location is probably just surrounded by more office buildings than the former.

I scan the restaurant. Size-wise it’s a bit smaller than the previous, but it has the same decor. The pastry display, which looks nearly identical to Clarendon’s, has an old-fashioned scale presiding over the confections, with stacks of croissants placed on both scale plates. I suppose this is meant to add some sense of authenticity to whatever aesthetic Tatte is trying to cultivate — which at this point in the day is still lost on me.

I take a seat at the bar lining the wall overlooking the sidewalk. The woman next to me is giving a Zoom presentation in a Tatte, which is a wild combination of words, using phrases like “statistical significance,” and talking about which “coefficients” are moving in what “directions.” I make my way back to the water station and fill up a cup of water.

It isn’t until I’ve downed three healthy glasses, nursing my once-mild, now slightly more problematic hangover, that I see… a little stand in the back corner of the restaurant. It is, you guessed it (or maybe you didn’t because WHY would you need this) a merch table, full of packaged pastries, sweatshirts, and canvas tote bags with various brunch-related words (or just the word “BRUNCH”) ironed onto them.

11:16 a.m.: I decide I need to leave to walk back to the Metro.

Stop 3: Tenleytown

11:38 a.m.: If my excursion today were a marathon, this would be when I hit the proverbial wall. As I exit the Tenleytown Metro stop, I ask myself a question I’m sure you, reader, are asking if you’ve made it this far: “Why are you doing this?” Originally I was trying to prove how many outposts there were — and how close they were together — in a way that was somehow funny and smart, and maybe figure out what’s so buzzy about these places. I thought I could probably bop between all 10 Tattes in a span of three, maybe four hours, demonstrating just how condensed the empire had become.

But my running account of the morning in my notes app contains nothing insightful so far, just pedestrian observations that could probably be made in [insert coffee shop chain of choice]. I start to think I’ve overcommitted to the bit and turned what should’ve stayed as a funny Slack message to a coworker (at most) into a futile, lengthy affair.

11:50 a.m.: I walk down Wisconsin Avenue and completely miss the turn for the Tatte. After a few seconds fussing on my Maps app I realize I need to turn around because the road to Tatte is actually a nondescript driveway into the new mixed-use development, City Ridge — something Tatte’s website calls a “neighborhood,” in the same way New York Avenue developers want “SoNYa” to be a thing. City Ridge is a redevelopment of the old Fannie Mae campus that currently houses Tatte, the new Wegmans, and a bank in addition to hundreds of apartments, and will ultimately include an Equinox gym, a Taco Bamba, and King Street Oyster Bar.

11:51 a.m.: I wish I could come up with a better descriptor, but this whole place feels like it could be featured on the Liminal Spaces Twitter account. It’s the smallest Tatte yet, with the simplest interior architecture; no cut-outs, no wall of windows inside the space separating one half of the restaurant from another. It’s also the least busy, likely thanks to its somewhat random location in a nascent development project. A few people are working inside, but most are outside on the sunnier patio.

The inside is fairly dark, the sunlight blocked by the buildings next to and above it. It sort of feels like being inside with the blinds closed on a sunny afternoon: separated from the outside world, but not enough to forget the outside world exists. Bleak.

11:58 a.m. I use the bathroom, drink a few more glasses of water, and need to leave.

Stop 4: Dupont Circle

12:29 p.m. Not to linger on this marathon analogy, but if the Red Line trip down to Tenleytown was my wall, walking up the Dupont escalator steps is my second wind. Physically, my systems are improving, thanks to the water, and my mental endurance is buoyed by the fact that I’m nearly halfway through my stops. The Dupont Tatte is the first of what I call the Dupont Big Three: three locations within a 10-ish-minute walk of one another.

12:34 p.m. I approach the Dupont Tatte (formerly the very prominent Starbucks at Connecticut and 18th) and am greeted by a cacophony of spoons and forks clinking in sinks, hums of espresso machines, and chairs scooching across the tile floor. I’m really in the thick of it. It’s the busiest Tatte I’ve been in yet, which makes sense because it’s lunchtime. Before the door has closed behind me, a bright-faced woman behind the counter, despite looking as if she’s taking five orders at the same time while also pulling an espresso shot and baking a whole loaf of bread, makes direct eye-contact with me and yells “Hello, welcome!”

In the line, I look at the pastry display and notice that it has the same purposefully distressed scale as the Bethesda location. The blonde woman next to me is taking a picture of it. I’m reminded of something I heard once in a podcast about the soullessness of fast-casual restaurants — to paraphrase, that places like Sweetgreen and Chipotle are dining and food robbed of all culture and community, with false replacements of those then injected back in.

I decide I’ll get a cold brew, which I’m aware is a dumb decision even as the words are leaving my mouth to order, but it at least maintains some thematic continuity on my very dumb decision-making day. (See also: slight hangover, accidental trip to Pentagon, the whole concept of this trip.) I notice my coffee cup has “Tatte Like Latte” written in a cutesy script, as if the cup itself is winking at me.

There’s a pretty fair balance of laptop workers, business-y looking meetings, and people having what looks like a relaxed lunch in here. I Slack my editor, “lots of The Shirt in here,” which is true — but I’m not sure if that’s a product of the Tatte of it all or the Dupont of it all, probably both.

12:59 p.m.: I finish my (average-tasting) cold brew ($4.50) in approximately 30 seconds, which is a normal and healthy pace to consume a caffeinated drink and will not create problems for my future self, and decide to keep going. My phone says I should be at the West End Tatte in just eight minutes.

Stop 5: West End

1:06 p.m. I beat the Apple Maps ETA and walk up to the West End Tatte, the first Tatte to open in the D.C. area.

As anyone could have predicted, the cold brew is not sitting well. I’m essentially vibrating, the caffeine amplifying my hangover shakes. Also, on the walk over, the back of my knee starts to feel a little funny, a dull ache in my muscle, and for the first time all day I thought about what shoes I was wearing (Doc Marten loafers).

This Tatte is several decibels quieter than the Dupont location, although it could be a result of the higher ceilings and more square footage. The clientele is a bit younger too, which makes sense because it is right next to GW’s campus. A woman in a very pretty royal blue dress next to me has finished her meal and is scrolling through a man’s Hinge profile. Maybe they’ll go on a coffee date at a Tatte.

1:23 p.m. In addition to forgetting my water bottle, I’ve also forgotten a block for my phone’s charging cord, so I sit and try to charge my phone through my laptop, but my knock-off cord isn’t cooperating with my laptop, so I’m doing that embarrassing unplugging-plugging cycle. Staring out the window, I contemplate every decision that has led me to this point in both a literal and existential sense. I leave for the third location in the Dupont Big Three, Foggy Bottom.

Stop 6: Foggy Bottom

1:33 p.m. The nine-minute walk here was more unpleasant than the last, and the ache in my knee is growing from dull to acute. I think this is cosmic retribution for joking with people that my excursion could be considered an athletic feat, an extreme sport that once I’ve completed, someone could make a documentary about. I think I’m probably not documentary material, at least not one I would watch, if I’ve incurred an injury from a trip to several boring bakery chain locations.

I decide before I’ve even entered the building that this is the worst Tatte, purely based on its location. It is, unfortunately, across the street from my junior year dorm building, and no one should, I think, be anywhere remotely near their junior year dorm building at the age of 25. Inside, nearly everyone looks like they’re there on a work lunch break, or in a business meeting. I feel underdressed in my overalls and decide to just use the bathroom and get the hell out.

1:38 p.m. Because my knee is hurting, I Metro to the next stop, which is just one stop away on the Blue Line, and would otherwise be about a 15-minute walk.

Stop 7: Farragut North

1:48 p.m. I arrive in just 10 minutes — public transit baby! The Farragut West station spits me out directly in front of the cafe. This is probably the second-most empty store of the day, after Tenleytown, and it’s not as architecturally impressive on the inside. I think it was also previously a Starbucks?

The few people inside are working on laptops, and outside, two people who I assume to be coworkers are eating lunch. I grab a table next to the window that overlooks the patio. Directly in front of me is a woman in big sunglasses eating a big salad, not looking at her phone or laptop or reading — just engaged in a staring contest with a little sparrow that’s bouncing its way toward her plate.

If the Tenleytown experience hadn’t been so weird, I would’ve ranked this Tatte at the top of the Bad Vibes list, but at least outside, I can clearly see normal life still going on.

I grab some water and try to stretch my leg knowing I have about a 15-minute walk down I Street NW to my next location. (Three of the 10 Tattes in the region are on I Street, Tatte Corridor.)

2:00 p.m.: With my phone battery at a whopping 14%, I gather my things and head deeper downtown to the next spot, where I plan to eat lunch.

Stop 8: City Center 

2:17: p.m. There could be more to say about this particular Tatte, but unfortunately, none of it will be coming from me as this is where I black out. To return to the marathon analogy, this is where I would’ve shamefully tracked down the little cart that hauls the quitters to the finish line. The store is overwhelmingly crowded and loud, and I’m not sure where to put myself in it.

2:20 p.m. My phone, and by extension my GPS, now on 4%, I decide to leave for my penultimate stop before it dies.

Stop 9: Mass Ave (or Capitol Crossing)

2:35 p.m. Another 15-minute walk later, I am at the Massachusetts Avenue Tatte, in the Capitol Crossing development that’s also home to buzzy restaurants like Bar Spero, L’ardente, and Japanese food hall Love, Makoto. Once inside I have to walk down a short flight of steps into the actual restaurant, where it’s fairly quiet, with a few people working on laptops, taking phone calls, and one table of friends meeting up for lunch. My original plan was to eat lunch at my final stop — the 14th Street Tatte — but I worry I might not make it there alive if I don’t eat immediately. I order the roasted cauliflower sandwich ($12) — a pita stuffed with a mixture of cauliflower, pine nuts, spiced labneh, golden raisins, chiles, cilantro, and capers, and take a seat next to a woman reading a very long Washingtonian article on her laptop.

2:43 p.m.: The pita is, I hate to admit, pillowy in a way that makes my body sink into my seat on my first bite. Granted, I’m so hungry by this point that a single almond could’ve probably elicited the same response. I’m eating it quickly, too quickly, really devouring it, sauce and juice spilling out over my fingers and capers dropping onto my lap without me bothering to pick them up between bites. I’m an unfortunate sight for my fellow Tatte-ers.

3:03 p.m.: My stomach now somehow feels worse than it did before I ate, probably because I consumed the pita as if I was trying to win the world’s fastest pita-eater competition. All I have left is a short-ish walk to the Metro, a brief trip on the Green Line, and another short walk to my final destination. I gather my things and leave.

Stop 10: 14th Street 

3:30 p.m.: I’ve reached the finish line. Any sense of accomplishment is dampened by the pain in my knee, a developing headache that started on the most recent leg of this journey, the aforementioned stomachache, and the fact that I haven’t thought of a single thesis about Tatte yet.

This Tatte is definitely more bustling than the last, and it’s certainly larger, both inside and outside. I would attribute this to its location in the middle of 14th Street, and the fact that it’s 3:30 p.m. on a sunny Friday afternoon. There’s a healthy balance of people working, and people casually chatting, maybe taking advantage of a Summer Fridays situation. Despite the burning in my abdomen, I decide I should get a treat to round out the day and pick out a roasted strawberry tea cake ($3.50).

My phone now fully dead and my cord completely inoperable, I sit for a few minutes contemplating if I should ask someone to borrow a charger or go home and stare at the ceiling for three hours, pretending this entire day never happened. I go with the former, and a very kind woman working on her laptop pulls a charger out of her backpack.

By the time I’m ready to leave, it’s nearly 4 p.m. I left my house at 8:20 a.m. It did not, in fact, take “only a few hours” to get to every Tatte in the D.C. region, in case anyone was wondering, which they probably were not.

I’ve never been inside a Parisian patisserie, but even using my imagination, at no point in any of the 10 Tattes today did I feel remotely close to that. Whatever atmosphere Tatte is trying to emulate is likely less important than what it provides most basically: a place to camp out with wifi, coffee, and natural light in the work-from-anywhere era — an offering that is nonspecific, easily replaceable, and in Tatte’s case, conveniently located about every five blocks in the wealthier parts of the city, where more residents are probably working from home.

Other than Joe Biden, I’m not sure who is raving about Tatte’s food or baked goods, and surely, there are better, more local places to pick up an indulgence in the D.C. area (ahem, Saku Saku Flakerie, Rose Ave Bakery, Bayou Bakery, to name a few.) I guess it’s scratching a specific “third place” itch, although I’m sure whatever company eventually takes over the Tatte current outposts could do the same — and I definitely did not need to visit all 10 to come to that conclusion.