Interview: Baker & Spice

One of the first tenants to move into Dubai’s Souk Al Bahar, a shopping and dining destination next to the Burj Khalifa, closed its doors this summer for renovations. Rather than just closing for a quick spruce-up however, Baker & Spice spent the three months completely reburbishing its flagship organic brasserie and building a large open kitchen that is the proud focal point of the outlet — and came at the expense of space in the dining room, Caterer Middle East learns.

“Most people would say that spending extra money to lose seats in the restaurant business is not advised, but for us, we don’t always take the safe choice financially,” explains Baker & Spice country manager Andre Gerschel.

Speaking about the motivations behind the new kitchen, he states: “We spent money on the things that matter during the renovation. We expanded our kitchen triple-fold and you can see into it from all angles. I think it says something very strong when you are willing to put it all on display like that.”

Continuing, he adds: “We haven’t hired any staff — we have exactly the same number of people — and we have the same philosophy; we have just focused on the physical equipment that allows us to put more money on the plate than we had before — and this is an important part of our ethos.”

Gerschel, who is from New York and went to culinary school in the US, elaborates on what he means by this: “I’m a customer of many restaurants; I love eating out and I think it’s extremely important as an operator to eat out a tonne. I know when I’m at a restaurant that puts the money on the plate — when they really put love and care into making the food, and the ingredients required to make it.

“We don’t buy food, we buy ingredients — that means that absolutely everything is home-made and hand-made from scratch, every single day. We make our own yoghurt and our own bread, for example, and [to do this] we have a huge team for a relatively humble restaurant. It is labour intensive, and there is always somebody here on-site, but we do this because we want to be in control of the whole process and make sure that we’re putting the money on the plate for our customers.”

Gerschel’s approach echoes the outlook of Baker & Spice founder Yael Mejia, who is often described as someone who changed the way in which people ate in Dubai. When she unveiled the concept in 2009, not only was Baker & Spice situated outside of a hotel, but it was serving organic dishes, using locally source produce — virtually unheard of at that time.

“Her entire philosophy about the way that the restaurant business should aspire to be run was very different. One of the first things that seemed crazy was we never had Coca Cola on the menu — eight years ago that was something very different. When she opened this business the words ‘locally sourced’ and ‘organic’ didn’t exist. The fact that we have Starbucks and McDonald’s trying to use those words now is great — I hope they adopt the philosophies — and it’s interesting to see the transition.

“Nowadays it has become more commonplace to use the words that we started off using in the beginning, such as organic, local, fresh and homemade. These were the four pillars we started with and applied to everything from a cup of coffee to a main course. In a lot of ways, the company has been inspiring to me personally.”

Formerly of Okku and Jumeirah Restaurant Group, Gerschel took over the company reins from Mejia about eight months ago and says when he first met her, Mejia told him her “culinary fingerprints can be seen all over the world”.

Continuing, he shares: “That’s an insane sentence to hear. I liken it to the tennis example all the time — what would you do if you found out that everyone from Andre Agassi to Roger Federer to Rafael Nadal to Pete Sampras to Michael Chang to Novak Djokovic, for years, had all worked with the same coach and nobody knew who it was? That’s her. She’s founded a legacy and a dynasty of excellent chefs all over the world, who have worked for her and gone on to do exceptional things.”

Over time, Baker & Spice, as a brand, has evolved to encompass a bunch of identities. Besides its café identity and new look à la carte restaurant, it operates a shop in Manzil — opposite Souk Al Bahar — which Gerschel refers to as “an extension of everyone’s fridge”, joking that Baker & Spice has been been “feeding the pregnant women of Dubai for eight years”.

Building up a faithful clientel is something the brand has taken seriously since its launch and Gerschel reveals that when menus change or different items are stocked, customers don’t hold back from voicing their opinions — which he couldn’t be happier about.

“The worst thing you can have as an operator is apathy — it’s great when you have a vocal audience and that’s been something that’s true for us from the beginning.”

Happy to shake things up and drive the business forward, Gerschel explains that he is trying to present Baker & Spice in a new light.

“I wanted to take this [the refurbished outlet] in a more à la carte direction — people love us for breakfast and lunch but I want them to fall in love with us for dinner as well,” he explains, summing up part of the motivation behind the revamp.

The freshly made-over restaurant features a new menu and Gerschel, who describes himself as a “a kichen guy before anything else”, continually pushes Baker & Spice’s chefs to come up with new dishes; all the while using locally grown vegetables and working with organic farmers.

It was Gerschel who introduced meat-free Mondays at Baker & Spice, partly in response to changing market conditions and partly due to the brand’s passion for using UAE-grown vegetables.

“We recognise that the size of everyone’s wallets is not the same as it used to be and we want to be very sensitive to that. Putting money on the plate also means putting money back into the customer’s wallet in terms of sense of value, so on Mondays you can get a three-course meal for 79 dirhams (US $21.50) and it’s completely vegetarian. It’s also often gluten-free and dairy-free, and it presents a huge challenge for us creatively.

“It’s completely driven by the chefs and they’re not allowed to use any dishes from their home countries, so we have guys researching Guatemalan cuisine, or trying to make vegetarian Cuban sandwiches or looking into Nepalese curries — which, for a Sri Lankan chef, is a very big departure. I’ve got a guy who came up with a special Norwegian pickle dish that’s coming out soon; we are striving to use the same gorgeous, local produce in creative ways.”

In the winter season, all of Baker & Spice’s produce comes from UAE farmers and the company has six delivery drivers tasked with collecting the ingredients for the chefs.

“Drive all the way out to the far reaches of Al Ain and Abu Dhabi and you’ll see fields of corn growing in the desert. It’s extraordinary and a testament to the technology of irrigation and how much things have changed. When we started, there were about five or six organic products available, and it was mostly tomatoes and cucumbers, grown by four or five farmers. Now you’re talking about 28 farmers with a product catalogue of at least 120 items,” he reveals.

While there’s no escaping the fact that it is harder in the summer months for operators to obtain local produce due to the weather conditions, Gerschel confirms that Baker & Spice still manages to source a lot of what it needs from inside the country during summer.

Asked more about this committment to working with local farmers, he tells Caterer candidly: “It has nothing necessarily to do with ethics; it’s actually about quality. When things travel a shorter distance to reach us, they’re better and they taste better. For us, that’s what it’s all about. It needs to taste better first and foremost, and then if it fits the ethical standards that we hope it does — fantastic. And then if it fits the cost structure our customers want, we really have a full service offer.

“I do think it’s important [to serve organic food] but at the end of the day, it’s a better product. A cow that’s been treated better, tastes better — it just does and if it didn’t, we would probably have different practices.”

In terms of whether he has noticed an increasing trend for consumers to be concerned about ethical standards when they’re dining out, he remarks: “I think there’s a danger in being trendy. I think it’s really important to understand what a label is and what it means, what it intends and what it wants to say.

"The word ‘organic’ has been massively misappropriated. To understand what organic is, you have to go and physically visit your suppliers. That’s an intensive process to adopt for a local operator running out of Dubai but you can taste the difference — people who come here repeatedly don’t know why our food tastes different. There’s nothing different about the specific ingredients; if anything we show a wonderful restraint. We don’t put 16 ingredients on a 60,000 dirham gold plated plate and hide it behind a European chef’s name, for example. While there is a market for that, what we’re serving is very simple food.”

Coming back to what labels mean and why embracing the philosophy behind a word is all-important, Gerschel tells Caterer: “I love arguing about food with people and the minute you say the words ‘organic’ and ‘ethically sourced’, it’s going to provoke debate, which we love to have, and it challenges us to be more on our toes.”

With thoughts turning to the other ways in which Baker & Spice stands out from its peers, Gerschel says that the brand successfully manages to retain its staff for years at a time, which is surprising not only in a transient city like Dubai, but in the hospitality industry in general.

Asked why he thinks the company has been able to do this, he says that while he realises that his staff could be earning more money at other places — and never shies away from making sure that they know this — people “learn a tonne” by working with Baker & Spice and he thinks there’s a real sense of camaraderie among the team.

“The most important thing you can do in any sort of pastoral role is be attentive. You can make a lot of mistakes that are covered by attentiveness — just show up and show that you care, even when it’s inconvenient.

"Ultimately I want to give staff a place where they can learn and I want to continue this idea of having a teaching kitchen, and then there is no limit to how long somebody would want to stay.”

Continuing, he reveals that the team works a five-day week and takes part in engagement programmes.

He explains: “So, if somebody wants to take a class, and they’ve been here for more than a year, I pay for it fully — whatever it is. If one of my chefs want to learn about wine, or a waiter wants to learn about restaurant finance, or a maître d wants to learn Arabic, they can.

“We also have an amazing innovation programme in place that I love: if you work in the kitchen, you have to figure out a way to make someone in the front-of-house’s life easier. So, you come up with a life hack and present it at the end of the month and, if you win, you get a generous voucher from a store or a day off, or something extra. And it can be something simple that wins — we were throwing out banana peels and one of the guys in the kitchen recommend that we use them to shine shoes front-of-house.

"Often our staff are coming from places where they use what they have [to hand] and that’s something we have always been big fans of.”

Similarly, Baker & Spice sticks faithfully to the philosophy of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’, using empty water bottles as containers for pomegranate molasses or olive oil, before eventually sending them to a glass melting factory in Ras Al Khaimah to become the jam jars that you’ll notice house the bill that arrives at the end of your meal.

Shifting gears to find out more about Baker & Spice’s new custodian, Caterer learns that the New Yorker has lived in Dubai for six years but has travelled extensively.

“I followed my stomach; the great thing about the hospitality industry is you can move pretty much anywhere,” Gerschel remarks, adding that it was also “the pace and the intensity” that attracted him to this industry.

Continuing, he asserts: “You’ll never be hungry, lonely or bored [working in the hospitality industry]”.

Identifying as a chef, with the training to back it up, and now being a director of operations, Gerschel’s breadth of experience is helpful when it comes to understanding his staff and knowing how to get the best out of his team, and he’s as passionate about this topic as he is about the quality of the organic dishes.

“I started as a dishwasher and that makes me a better front-of-house operator; it makes it easier for me to be compassionate when I need to be, to discipline when I need to. I’m in a chef’s jacket more often than I am in a suit jacket. I love the intensity of the kitchen environment. It’s meritocratic — you can’t BS your way in the kitchen. You can’t fake it. You have to work hard and practice, and use your ways physically in a way that’s very satisfying and intensively gratifying.

"I want these guys [the chefs] to be front and centre. They’ve been here for many years and they deserve the accolades they’re definitely going to get with this new menu, which is much more refined.

“My generation is one of the last generation of cooks that grew up under the Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay type of crazy, intense chef. It just doesn’t exist anymore. I wish it did but the truth is, it doesn’t work anymore. It’s not how you coax and compel talent anymore. The age of the tyrant chefs and operators is over.

“It’s an intense environment and, yes, we do yell, throw things and get furious but it’s understandable if you’re doing anything for 17 hours a day, at that level of intensity.

“People just don’t understand that food is an ingredient that is inherently subject to atrophy. It is constantly dying; the minute you take it from wherever it belongs, every second it’s losing loveliness and every mistake that we make with food makes it less lovely, and if all we’re trying to do is give credit to the intense work the farmer has put in, the soil has put in, and the sun has put in, I think that’s something worth yelling about. That’s something worth getting frustrated with,” he reasons.

Blending an old school work ethic with more modern day approaches to staff engagement arguably makes for a well-rounded operator who will likely be a mentor to many staff. Offering advice for anyone wanting to follow in his footsteps, Gerschel jokes that “restlessness helps while sleep doesn’t”, before adding that a hospitality career is one where hard work pays off.

He also offers the following advice: “Don’t take shortcuts, don’t chase money and when you’re not learning anymore [in a job], leave. That might take two months or 15 years. Like anything that grows, you can grow out of a job.”

With the conversation drawing to a close, Gerschel shares his thoughts on handling competition in Souk Al Bahar and its surrounding area.

“If other operators ask me where I buy stuff or how much I get stuff at cost for, I tell them. I want to compete on real things, plate to plate, not because of a secret. And the cluster effect works — I want tonnes of great restaurants to open up here. People benefit from that — ultimately the more people who walk though this complex, the better it is for everyone here,” he concludes.