01 / Story
We opened with a domestic oven and a folding table.
Six years, three shops, and roughly the same twelve things on the board.
The first winter
We sold out by half past ten every day and thought it meant we were doing well. It did not. It meant we were baking about a third of what the street actually wanted, and sending people away hungry is not a business model, it is just a shortage with good manners.
So we bought a proper deck oven, second hand, from a bakery two towns over that was closing. It came through the back door in pieces, and it is still the only oven Mill Street has.
A shortage with good manners.
Then two more, slowly
Harbour Road opened in 2024, four years after Mill Street, and it is the only one we designed rather than inherited: two ovens, a prep kitchen and a seven o’clock start, because a working harbour does not wait until nine.
Kettle Lane came a year later and is deliberately the opposite. Ten seats, one oven and no kitchen behind it. It is a shop, not a cafe, and it is the most profitable square metre we have.
What we learned is that a second shop is not the first one again. The board is the same because the board is the brand. Everything behind the counter is a different argument each time.
The board is the brand. Everything behind it is a different argument.
What has not changed
Everything is made on the premises it is sold on, and everything is sold the day it is made. No wholesale, no second brand, and nothing arrives frozen on a pallet.
We also still close on Mondays, in all three. Six days of a half past four start is sustainable. Seven is not, and the quality showed it before we admitted it.
Made on the premises it is sold on.