Going against the grain, Luca Fiorio decided to start his own micro bakery in Ely. Charlotte Griffiths finds out more
Until recently there was little to note about Saturday mornings on St Mary’s Street in Ely. Now, however, you can tell when the weekend’s begun, because of the long line of people – rain or shine – queuing outside a stylish sage green store that’s become the public face of Grain Culture: the bakery everyone’s talking about.
Rough-hewn sourdough loaves big enough to feed entire families, wire baskets of toothsome baguettes, a wall piled high with bread of every shape and colour – and tray after tray of tempting pastries, glossed to a shine, waiting to be thrust into a paper bag, torn into hunks and enjoyed greedily even before you’ve bustled out of the shop.
Luca Fiorio is the baker and brains behind this latest addition to Cambridgeshire’s food scene, but it’s not even 12 months since he was scooping at Jack’s Gelato, where Luca worked after moving to Cambridgeshire from London. “It feels like ages ago – but I only stopped working for Jack at the end of December last year,” Luca says.
Prior to landing in Ely, Luca and his wife Robyn had been living in London. Robyn worked (and still does) for the NHS across Islington and Camden, while Luca was earning his keep in restaurant kitchens, where he’d been cheffing since he was 15 years old. “I didn’t want to go to school – I had no interest whatsoever in that,” Luca says of his childhood. “After many fights with my dad, I said, ‘That’s it. I just want to cook’. My dad said, ‘Fine – I’ll sort something out’ – and he found me an internship at Combal.Zero, a restaurant in a castle just outside of Turin.”
Led by Italian chef Davide Scabin, Combal.Zero is still regularly listed as one of the 100 best restaurants in the world, and has a strong reputation for innovative and extremely creative eating experiences. It’s quite the place to start your career. “I did that for six months – I didn’t get paid, but my dad was happy to give me money for fuel for my Vespa,” Luca grins. “It was fun. When you’re 15, you just feel like you’re part of something. At the end of that, I got my first tattoo – and then… I
was a chef.”
The young chef worked his way around Italy: he spent winters in kitchens in the north west of the country, cut off by mountains. Then in cosmopolitan Milan, climbing his way up the ladder one rung at a time. Then Greece for a year, where he became a sous chef and met the friends who first encouraged him to move to London. After a brief, unsuccessful return to Italy, which led Luca to swear never to live in the country again, he drove his van across Europe to Blackheath, where he made a home on four wheels – then eventually gave in to his friends’ badgering and moved to their sofa in Stoke Newington. Luca met his wife around the same time: “She moved in, and then we just… stayed together,” he laughs. “When I met her she was working in Medway, in Kent – she started as a locum where she is now, and just climbed up the ranks. It’s a totally different world,” he acknowledges.
Throughout his career, Luca has had an obsession with bread. “People overlook it,” he says, when asked why it matters. He always knew that a bread-based business was in his future, and the young couple had this in the back of their minds while searching for a place outside the capital to call home. They found Ely by chance, and fell in love with the perfect commuter town, then decided to invest in a home rather than building a business – in part because Luca was ready for a break from kitchens: “I worked right until the day the removal guys came to pack up.”
Once settled in Cambridgeshire, Luca started working a few days a week with Jack, which – along with caring for his children and supporting his commuting wife – filled up a great deal of the young chef’s time. But eventually an opportunity presented itself: like many of Cambridge’s food businesses, Grain Culture started life in their garage. “Imagine just a standard, new-build garage – that was the bakery,” he grins. “I had a double-door fridge for the dough, basically the size of the shutter: and then I had two tiny mixers, 25 litres each, and two tiny ovens. I had a door, and a bench, and a strip about two metres long and one metre wide where I could walk. People would say: ‘Can I come have a look?’ But… there was no space,” he laughs.
Luca set up the business to sell his bread wholesale and at farmers’ markets twice a month. “And then slowly, slowly I added on to that,” he says. “Eventually, I stopped working for Jack when I picked up a big customer – Provenance Kitchen – that was perfect timing. I had a steady income when I was delivering to them, and I added on various smaller customers in Ely – just slow, steady, at the right pace.”
It’s not just about selling to a community, it’s a relationship. It’s a two-way thing
This calm and careful growth meant he was able to take opportunities when they presented themselves: a chance to take over a professional catering unit meant the business could move out of the garage and step up to the next level. “It’s so weird,” he laughs. “I honestly thought I’d be in the garage for a year. I’d been in there what, two – three months? And now I’m in this unit in Witchford, ten minutes away. There was always a plan, but the time frame was nothing like what it turned out to be. It just all fell into place.”
Interestingly, the shop that’s now the site of such bustling weekend trade – soon to be repeated on Wednesdays for a new midweek bake – wasn’t in that plan. “Originally, I didn’t even want a shop – I was working two Saturdays a month, earning pocket money – the wholesale business was taking care of itself – and I was living on the money, having a good lifestyle,” he says. “And then the opportunity of the shop came along: the building was awesome, and it was on the right side of town.”
The friendships Luca’s made while selling bread at Ely Market have relocated to the shop, where he now spends a great deal of his Saturdays in conversation with customers, greeting familiar faces and making new connections. This community feeling is something he’s extremely proud of, and which he hopes the local inhabitants also value. “I know most people already: I might not remember all their names – but I know them,” he laughs. “It’s not just about selling to a community, it’s a relationship. It’s a two-way thing. Imagine if you had interesting stuff to do right on your doorstep – it makes you feel part of something. That’s what my favourite thing about the shop is: it’s all about the community, these people who might have seen each other at schools, at supermarkets – but now they meet at the shop as well. Ely’s dying for more businesses like this. You’ve got such a mix of people here: it’s the perfect commuter town, and it’s so pretty.”
Luca talks fondly about the groups of people who would come to his farmers’ market pitch and stock up on bread. “People would walk out laden,” he says. “And now they come to the shop – and they stop coming to Ely only twice a month, they now come to Ely regularly – and they say they can’t wait for me to open on a Wednesday, because they’ll come in then, too. You see all those articles about shops shutting down in Ely – but you just have to come up with something that people want, and build that relationship. There’s a number of people who, though they might not need bread that week, they might not need that pastry, come because they want to support you.”
Luca’s schedule and the fact that all his bakes are started two days in advance means he doesn’t currently get a full day off in the week. He’s been known to leave social events early to refresh the leaven and after his children go to bed, will regularly head back to the unit to check on the loaves’ progress. “It’s constant,” he admits. “But I enjoy that, I really do – it’s a living thing, it’s part of what I do. And with bread, there is a degree of flexibility: I can manage my own time. It’s all about temperature: I just have to start stuff sooner and let it prove longer, colder…”
Like many chefs, he’s not a fan of shortcuts. “I mean – why? There are so many other people taking shortcuts with bread, because they want to produce more, spend less time at work and make it more convenient so they can achieve a decent lifestyle – and I think that’s what ruins it,” he says. “It annoys me. These ‘artisans’. What’s the point? Why are you sending out bread you baked yesterday afternoon? It’s like with restaurants: if you don’t want to work evenings or work weekends – do something else! This is what it takes.”
For now, Luca is happy with where he is. He’s stepping back from selling bread on the market to focus on sales through the shop, and adding a midweek bake to the schedule will see even more queues of keen bread-heads lining up to purchase pastries. Collaborative projects are always high on his wish list, and he’s regularly found sliding into the DMs of chefs to suggest they work together. “What is it going to bring me financially? I’m not going to live on that order – it’d just be a cool thing to do,” Luca smiles. “We all value what we’re doing. Let’s do it together.”
But if the last year has taught him anything, it’s that change is inevitable. So what developments would the baker like to see happen next? “I just want a tight operation, producing the best we can possibly produce. We’ve got a great shop; I’m not planning on changing that. Maybe it would be cool to do something similar in Cambridge: one room, stuff gets baked and delivered within half an hour; open two days a week only– when it’s there, it’s there, and you need to queue up to get it,” he says. “The dream for the Ely shop is to have enough people that every Saturday – and I’m happy to do the bake, to wake up at 2am – I’ll drop the bread off, and then, I’ve got this bench outside the shop, to just sit, have a coffee and a chat for a couple of hours – and then start my weekend,” he grins at the thought. “Even as a baker or a business person, I never really thought I could do this. It’s great. The amount of friendships that have come about through the business, just because of… bread.”
Luca bakes twice a week from 9am on Saturday and Wednesday, 30a St Mary’s Street, Ely CB7 4ES, @grainculturehq
