Story
A bakery, a bankruptcy, and an oven nobody wanted.
The building was a bakery from 1911 until 2009, and then it was nothing at all for seven years.
When we took the lease the agent's particulars described the oven as an “obstruction” and offered to have it removed at the landlord's expense. It is nine feet deep, lined with firebrick, and weighs somewhere north of four tonnes. We signed on the condition that nobody touched it.
It took eleven months and a retired oven-builder from Naples to get it working again. He told us, through his daughter who was translating, that the brick had been laid by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing, and that we should be embarrassed to have considered a gas conversion. He was right on both counts.
We light it on a Tuesday morning and it does not go out until Sunday night. By Friday the floor is holding four hundred degrees with no fuel added at all — which is the entire reason the bread tastes the way it does, and the reason the kitchen is the hottest place in Shoreditch.
The kitchen
Nine chefs, led by Iona Brennan, who came to us from a fish restaurant in Galway and has never once made a sauce she was satisfied with. The pastry section is run by her brother, which is exactly as tense as it sounds.
The room
Forty-four covers, eight at the counter, and a long table at the back that seats fourteen and has hosted three weddings, one wake and an unusually emotional company AGM.
Twelve suppliers · all within 140 miles
Swaledale, N. Yorkshire
Whole Hereford and Longhorn, dry-aged on the bone for forty-five days.
Flying Fish, Cornwall
Day boats out of Newlyn. Whatever they land is what we cook.
Namayasai, E. Sussex
Japanese vegetables grown on the South Downs. Cut Monday, here Tuesday.
Our own roof
Four hives, about ninety kilos a year, all of it into the honey tart.