The Open Bakery, Kemptown
Time at The Open Bakery: 11 years
Signature ingrediant: Croissants
Secret element in the mix: Coffee
I came here as maternity cover, as shop manager. I’d never worked in a bakery before. I’d worked in lots of other types of food environments, but not bakeries and I liked the idea of having something new to learn. It was only supposed to be temporary, but I ended up staying. As we opened more places, my role changed to general manager. It’s always been evolving, so it’s always been interesting. But it was the food – to learn about bread and pastries – that drew me at first. Working in restaurants and cafes, you don’t really see any of that process. I was really interested to be involved with that.
One of the most amazing things, is seeing the volume that one person can create. The bakers are sometimes working one person per shift. And the amount of bread that suddenly appears from the ovens is incredible. It’s the same with the pastry team. There’s suddenly 100 croissants! And that’s just one item for one day. There’s all the other products, too. It still find it mind-blowing – the consistency, and the quality of the team, and how they can make things. Then there’s the number of hours that go into it. The bakers are there all night. The whole thing is just kind of magical. Whereas restaurants and cafes are very open and shut, this is alive all the time. I love the early morning, when you just see a light on in the distance, and you’re not open to the public. It’s really nice when it’s quiet and you’re prepping things for the day.
My role is quite diverse. Part of it is managing the managers. We have 7 different managers. There’s head of each kitchen: the savoury kitchen, Jo’s kitchen, the patisserie kitchen, the bakery. We have 2 shops, the one at Queens’ park and here, and then we have markets, so there’s a market manager, and a workshop and classes manager. It’s kind of keeping the peace and making sure everyone knows what they are doing. Making sure that all the sections are running how they are supposed to be. There’s quite a lot of admin and website upkeep. Food safety and compliance is ongoing: making sure our policies are correct. And then there’s quite a lot of customer-facing work, which I really enjoy. I’m still quite involved in serving, too. So it’s a bit of everything.
I have a list of things that never get finished, and that’s been going on for 10 years. I plan for the week. I write a new list for each day, otherwise I don’t know where I am. It’s different from day to day, but I do have set things I do on set days. I tend to do production schedules twice a week, and they’ll be on the same day, because they need to be done at those times. But a lot of it is quite flexible, depending on what happens on those days. I tend to tackle anything difficult first thing in the morning – anything which requires concentration – because that’s when I’m most productive. So between 6 and 12 I’m good, then I start to get a bit tired. So anything that involves dealing with discussions or where there’s lots of typing, or anything that requires a bit of ‘juice’, I do first thing. But I enjoy the volume of stuff that needs to be organised. I like to have a lot going on.
We have between 30 and 40 staff altogether. It’s a lot of people. It changes depending on how many part-time staff we have. Pre-pandemic, everyone worked full time, and now a lot of people want to work less. I think people got so used to having more free time, maybe. But now there’s definitely a shift again to people needing more full time hours, especially with all the things that are changing, the cost of living etc. For a while, there were loads of staff, especially in the shop. And they were all part-time. So it’s been really changeable over the last few years.
I think being a patisserie makes it a bit more special than a cake shop. More skilled, more specialist, probably a bit more technical, too, which is always interesting, and maybe more diverse. We can pluck any recipe we like, and it can be quite obscure, something people don’t necessarily know of or see much. And people can maybe try things they’ve not seen before. Or we get people who’ve come over from France and they say, ‘Oh my goodness, we have that back home.’ And that’s really nice.
We opened under Real Patisserie umbrella, which is owned by Justin’s brother, Alistair. Alistair worked and trained in France and then came over and set up his first shop on Trafalgar Street. He wanted to open a patisserie and make French bread and French pastries, so that’s where the French influence stemmed from. When we opened up a little bit down the line from Real Patisserie, we were doing the same products. But when we left Real Patisserie and became independent, the idea was to have a bit of a broader European influence, because most of our chefs are European. Pre- Brexit, you had people from all over and they bring so much. So the intention is still to be a bit more European, but it’s difficult. A lot of our original recipes are French, and they’re really popular, so we end up making those. There is scope for diversity, though. Airam is Spanish, so they have been introducing some new things from their region. And Csaba, being Hungarian, will make things he knows when he runs classes. It’s nice to have an aspect that’s not so fixed.
It’s a special place. And the fact we’ve been successful and we’re quite busy and we’ve been doing well in competitions this year is really rewarding. We won regional for the best bread and bakery awards, but actually we came second in the UK overall. We were just nominated – which was a big shock, but lovely. When you think about what we do, it is pretty unique. There’s not many places that make as much as we do on site and do all the other bits as well. There’s lots of bakeries now but they are more like chains and they make all their stuff in a big warehouse, on a different scale. Whereas we’re all just making it here, for our own customers. And we have more control over what we are doing. I think it’s a really lovely place and it’s really nice to be part of it. I feel very lucky.
Community and the relationship with customers is really important. Both sites are very residential. Queens Park is incredibly residential, even though it’s by a park. And in Kemptown, we’re in a little neighbourhood street. It’s surrounded by a really nice pocket of businesses– a pizza place, a book shop, the Barley Mo pub. Customers are the core – that’s why you survive. People want to come in, and it’s so nice to have their support. And it’s a two-way thing: we’re there for them and they’re there for us, and that’s really nice. It’s a very different feel to working somewhere in the city centre. In the morning there’s often a queue down the street, of people waiting for their coffee. We’re probably the first place open in a big stretch – we open at 7. So people can come before they go to work.
You’ve got to find reward in what you’re doing, and lot of that is self motivation. But what makes working here worthwhile, is because it’s so nice: what we make – you have a pride in being part of that. The owner is lovely, and has a vision and open mind; the staff are lovely; the food is lovely. It’s a really lovely atmosphere. I think from early on, we tried to have the mentality it’s not ‘us and them’. It’s not kitchens and front of house. Everyone is aiming for the same goal, which is serve someone some lovely food, in a lovely manner. So having that whole process interlinked is important. It’s always been trying to keep that as our ethos, especially for the service team – to make sure they know they are involved. It can be difficult, especially if you’ve got new members of staff or you’re stretched, or it’s busy, and it’s maybe not perfect, but it is trying to make sure that everyone is friendly and respectful of each other in terms of staff and customers. Having that dynamic is really important. It makes the place feel warmer.
People who work in the bakery have a real sense of pride and care, and want to do a good job.Finding those people is hard sometimes. It’s so difficult, because when you’re interviewing people, they do a small trial. But you don’t really know until people start, how they’ll be. But the managers show their passion and knowledge, and make sure how they training is getting that across. You’ve got to be creative, got to be passionate, got to care – then the rest kind of happens. It makes me wonder how, sometimes, but it all seems to carry on. It’s quite nuts.
The kitchens are very different. In restaurants the kitchen staff are under pressure to create things to order. Here it’s like role reversed. They have time to prepare things in advance. But the whole shift for the front of house section is really under stress quite often. Because it’s just so busy. It makes the day go faster, though. You don’t clock watch. It’s nice if you like to be busy and there’s quite a lot of interchanging going on often. People are interested in other people’s sections. Some staff are shared.
We have a structure of training in terms of health and safety and food safety, but other things, especially front of house product knowledge is a lot more loose. You couldn’t tell everyone about everything in one go, because it just wouldn’t go in. So you’re hoping that organically it will happen, because they’ll ask about things, or you get to talk about them. But things can get lost in translation, and I get to hear something and I think, ’oh no, that’s not right.’ And then you’re undoing all that stuff. That is hard, because you want everyone to have the knowledge to feel confident about what they are doing. So training is constantly ongoing. There is no one here who knows everything, even in their section. Maybe Csaba and Airam, because they’re quite established in their roles, but things change all the time, too.
I can’t cope with food waste; it gets my goat. It’s challenging keeping up with ingrediant changes in products or costings. The war in Ukraine, global warming, there’s always something that causes change down the chain. It can be difficult, because if you make something you might not realise that the flour is a bad batch until you’ve baked it. If it’s behaved weirdly, you have to think ‘is that ok enough to sell, or is that not ok?’ If it’s not ok, it’s what do you so with it. Some things might be able to be recycled into something else. Otherwise we do food bank collections or ‘too good to go’ and if it’s really bad, milk people take it for their pigs, or the staff have it.. .but it depends on the product. And being consistent is important, so people know what they are going to get. There’s quite a strict check on consistency of products.
There have been some changes over the years. When COVID happened, we had to get rid of the table. Justin took it to his house, so that we could just have one or two customers in the shop at a time. Then, when things went back to normal, we couldn’t imagine how it ever fitted there. It was nice – that people who didn’t know each other would sit down and have a chat, eat their toast together in the morning and that kind of thing. But now that we have a market and shop in Queen’s Park, in the morning that floor space is just full of bread crates. It would be really hectic. We’ve made a coffee bar and rearranged the shelving a bit, and the table is in the cookery school now.
The savoury production used to be in that corridor in the Kemptown store where the flour is stored.We had one bench, smaller than this in the bread section. As things got bigger, It became apparent we needed another space. We needed somewhere really close and our cookery school venue came up. It did both things we needed. We use it for savoury kitchen and for classes. Then we opened the kitchen downstairs not so long ago.
Justin always taught a sourdough class once or twice a month on Sundays, and I used to work for a cookery school a long time ago, a Jamie Oliver one. So we often talked about how it would be nice to do baking classes. It’s been such a shame this kitchen opened much later than we wanted it to, partly due to COVID. When I went on maternity, quite a lot of stuff went on hold, too. But still, we’re doing it and it’s successful. We’ve been trying to catch up with it this year. So we’ve recruited another person to help set it up, do the advertising and get the classes running. It’s great to be taught by the chefs. And you come home with a lot of bread.
If the business was a patisserie, I think it would be a croissant, because it’s a kind of staple. We’re trying to be mostly that. Obviously we have things that add variety. But it’s a well known thing, it’s got lots of layers. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, maybe than there looks in the product. Or a millefeuille is a bit like that. It looks a bit more fancy, it’s a bit more of a treat, and there’s lots going on, lots of layers. It looks straightforward. I think those two products reflect how we are.
My son is 2 ½, and spending time with him is amazing. It’s nice to just go into his world. But by the time he’s in bed I probably get an hour before I go to bed myself. So there’s quite a small window of ‘me time’. I’m likely to watch tv. I do a lot of cooking. We do a lot of walking at weekends. Or go to the beach, to get some fresh air.
If I were an ingredient in the mix, I’d be coffee – a little fizzy and busy! I’ve quite busy mind and there is always a lot to organise, so it’s the early morning fuel to help me get through the list of jobs that need addressing each day. I like to think I am trying to help inject a bit of energy into the business to keep things rolling. (I’m also probably overthinking and causing a little bit of confusion along the way too! I’m a stickler for wanting to know what’s going on and trying to limit damage control!) I’ve worked here for so long, it all feels normal. But it’s still blowing my mind, so it must be really interesting, or I’d be bored by now!