John Naylor and Scott Anderson, partners at the Rosemont Market and Bakery, only see each other for a few hours a day, so it’s tough to keep tabs on each other. Anderson, the market’s in-house baker, rolls out of bed to be at work at around one o’clock in the morning and greets Naylor as he comes through the door at around eight. Anderson finishes up his shift around 10 or 11 a.m., and Naylor sticks around to man the front of the house until closing.

"You want to talk to Scott?" John asks, and repeats a joke as well worn as the decades-old grooves in front of the large oven. "He’s almost finished. See, he’s only working a half-day today."

Sloped dips in the hardwood floor appear in strategic spots throughout the bakery, cluing us into where previous bakers liked to work. There are some around the shaping tables, where decades of Piscopos worked long hours to produce the area’s most famous bread. Years of standing, hunched over a wooden block or a worn-down peel — the flat board used to load and pull bread into an out of the oven — have been recorded in a kind of macro-brail, felt only by walking slowly around the floor’s creased surface.

Anderson is now standing in one of those spots, talking while pulling baguettes out of his rotating oven. The door opens, and the Ferris wheel that carries the dough slowly spins in front of him. Easing the ride to a full stop, he pulls the baguettes out and slides them onto a cooling rack. Back at the Greengrocer, from whom the pair split in the fall of 2004, he used to have separate ovens for breads and pastries. As happens when switching venues, adjustments had to be made when they opened the market earlier this year. "We’re using this oven for pretty much everything," Anderson says into its cavernous interior. "I had to tinker with the formulas [baker’s versions of recipes] to get things to work, but they’re working."

That’s an understatement. The bread at the market is as beautiful and rustic as it was down on Commercial Street, and with an increased demand for pastries he even had to purchase a sheeter — a machine with large, mechanized rollers for creating flaky, multi-layered doughs. Anderson used to take on this backbreaking work by hand, and even has some trepidation about using machines. "We’re trying to walk that fine line between using machines and having it look rustic and hand-made."

Throughout the entire store, the removal of two suspended ceilings and six layers of linoleum flooring have given way to worn but polished hardwood floors and a higher ceiling, and it’s amazing what some coats of fresh paint can do to a space previously donut-grease brown. Scattered around the retail area are artifacts recovered during the renovation: a wooden sign advertising figs from Iraq, a heavy copper candy bowl used for pastries and candy making, an ancient wooden snow scraper. The Rosemont Market and Bakery is surrounded by remembrances of what the market used to be, and, appropriately, the goals of its current owners are aligned with those of the former: high quality, locally produced, neighborhood oriented.

"We love this neighborhood," Anderson and Naylor say almost simultaneously, echoing sentiments heard by other business owners who have recently relocated to Rosemont. The tree-lined neighborhood that branches in two directions off of outer Brighton is quiet, and growing younger by the year. "New moms and babies are always coming in here, and making good use of the tables out front." And with those new families come the demands of the young, educated diner in Portland: They want it fresh, they want it local, and they can tell the difference.

Naylor is happy to oblige.

"More important than buying organic, I like to know where my food is coming from. I got some organic chicken from Pennsylvania, but I don’t know the guy. This stuff," he points to the antibiotic and hormone free Mainely-Poultry in the cooler, "well, I know the guy. He wins."

The produce selection is pieced together from various purveyors and Maine producers; Naylor works with Native Maine, the Farm Fresh Connection, and as we’re discussing vegetables and herbs, Scott Howard from Olivia’s Garden walks in with some bunched basil and watercress. As the two barter over pricing, I try a leaf of the watercress. It’s out of this world, with a peppery kick that finishes long and strong. "I’d buy it," I chip in. "You don’t even need to dress that stuff."

While the owner’s heads are in the right place — they’re humble, they’re starting small, they joke about trying to make it to Thanksgiving so they can sell the local turkeys they’ve looked into — they’re like a parent who knows to buy their child clothes two sizes too big because they’re going to grow, and grow fast. Scott has kept his pastry assistant from the Greengrocer, Erin Lynch, and hired on Cree Hale-Krull as a delivery driver and baker. Rounding out the pastry department is Michael Shineman, the former chef of Diamond Cove and chocolatier responsible for the truffles of Rue au Chocolate. There’s unused equipment in the back — an oven, an extra eight-quart mixer, a bread molder — ready to be fired up for the summer, and John’s got ideas brewing to expand the retail side’s savory offerings.

They’re setting up, it seems, to wear some grooves into that floor themselves. Even, as the joke goes, if Anderson does only work half-days.

Andy King can be reached at dinnerwithandy@yahoo.com