a month into the first lockdown, our founder barney found himself at a loose end. missing work, he started baking pastries for neighbours from his mum mimi’s kitchen.
after a lot of experimenting, barney created what would become our most loved item: the croissant pastry cinnamon bun. he printed a few flyers, slipped them through letterboxes, and almost immediately found himself completely overwhelmed with orders.
soon he roped in his younger brother gabriel to help with deliveries. before long, a small army of friends began turning up each morning with bikes to help too. what started as a couple of trays from mimi’s kitchen quickly became a daily neighbourhood ritual.
It wasn’t long before barney opened his first shop — just a stone’s throw from home and just off portobello road.
today, we have 25 shops across london. barney’s mum can still often be found at our notting hill counter, and the recipes haven’t changed since those early days in mimi’s kitchen.
where we started
each of our bakeries belongs to the neighbourhood it’s in. we like to think of them as part of your everyday rhythm: your morning pastry on the way to work, your weekend coffee stop, or a window to linger in front of with friends before heading home with a box of buns.
our spaces are intentionally simple. no fuss, no flashy design. just enough room for the important things: proper pastries, good coffee and a clear view into the bakery so you can watch the bakers at work.
you will usually hear trays sliding in and out of ovens and someone debating which flavour to try for next weekend’s special. we want each bakery to feel like a small part of the neighbourhood, where we all share the same smell of fresh buns first thing in the morning.
our bakeries
barney started in his home kitchen, mixing the dough by hand, laminating the buns with french butter, and letting them rise slowly before baking them in his mother’s oven.
we now have a little help and we are working on a slightly larger scale, but our methods remain just as handmade as they were in mimi’s kitchen. every bun is made by hand, and it will always stay that way.
at the heart of our buns is our butter, sourced from normandy, the most celebrated butter producing region of france. with croissant dough at the centre of each bun, and tradition guiding every step, there was really nowhere else to look.
we bake throughout the day, refreshing our buns every three hours so there is always something warm coming out of the oven.
some things are worth keeping simple, and our dough is one of them.
