The latest chapter in the history of Fitzbillies began on 9 February 2011 when we first read that it had gone bankrupt and closed down. Tim kept a diary from that day through to our reopening. Now, with the benefit of hindsight and eight years’ experience, it’s interesting to look back on the combination of naivety and determination that saw us through.
Notes from Tim’s diary
It must have appeared simultaneously on my laptop in a coffee shop where I was putting the final gloss on a piece for the Guardian and on Alison’s desk in the marketing company where she was working. I was quietly doing my job, writing about food, and she was doing hers, relaunching and guiding big corporate brands.
It was a tweet from @stephenfry, comedian and famed alumnus of Cambridge University, who posted:
‘No! No! Say it ain’t so – not Fitzbillies? Why I tweeted a pic of one of their peerless Chelsea buns but a sixmonth ago.’
9 February 2011
I’d had some experience in catering. I’d spent a chunk of my youth working in kitchens in seaside towns in the UK, and in diners and dives in the US. But that was decades ago. Al had grown up in Cambridge. Her 21st birthday cake – a vast croquembouche – had been ordered from Fitzbillies and, like Stephen Fry, she knew the place as a Cambridge institution, a tea shop and bakery that prided itself on selling generations of students the world’s stickiest Chelsea buns. Now, when we followed the link to the local paper at the bottom of the tweet, we saw that recession had driven it into bankruptcy and it had shut its doors.
‘Did you see the tweet?’
‘I did. Terribly sad. Awful how places like that are going…’
‘I’ve called the agents. We’re going to view it on Monday.’
These days, when we think of bankruptcy, we tend to imagine large companies or even small countries cutting up their credit cards in an organised way. The reality for thousands of high-street businesses is more depressing, more human and more brutally ugly. When the bailiffs arrived at Fitzbillies, they asked the customers to leave, gave the staff a few minutes to assemble their personal possessions and hand over their keys and led them out of the building. The shop was still full of food, the bakery full of half-baked cakes and mixer bowls full of flour. The landlords subsequently cleared the place well, but when we arrived just weeks later, it was dark, filthy and unloved.
But it was also apparent that over the years the business had been contracting inside its shell. Sure, the cake shop was still out front, but everything behind it had suffered from a lack of cash. Equipment hadn’t been maintained, staff hadn’t been paid and, justifiably lacking motivation, they had let everything slip. Sections that couldn’t be made to work had just been closed down and forgotten, meaning that around 75% of the floor space of the building was unused. The place was a disaster area, but to Al it was still Fitzbillies, it still had the bones... the spirit of a lovely old business – and it couldn’t be left to die.
A large local estate agency had been appointed to handle the reassignment of the lease by the landlords, Pembroke College. The business itself, its equipment, goodwill and, as we were about to discover, its name, were in the hands of the Official Receiver. I have to admit, with some experience of the industry, that the idea of fighting to pick up the pieces of a business that had been on the slide for years, on a provincial high street and on the precipice of a recession seemed ridiculous, but Al’s enthusiasm was so consuming I wanted to support it. There were, after all, around 200 separate individuals and organisations expressing an interest that we had almost no chance of getting through, and in truth, it seemed better for us both to let the natural course of things crush this crazy idea rather than me.
We lashed together a document expressing interest. To be fair, once we’d set down Al’s experience in marketing, her connection to the town, my profile as a food writer and some entirely speculative figures, the idea didn’t look quite as absurd as I’d thought, but after we sealed the envelope and dropped it in a post box, I tried to get back to real work.
I was still conflicted, I must admit. In terms of the state of the high street and of the catering industry, this couldn’t be a worse time and yet I’d spent the last few years, like most British food writers, banging on about rediscovering our food culture, about how independent food businesses were being driven out of the high street, about the importance of good food from basic ingredients in everyday life rather than three-star restaurants. Suddenly here was a chance to do something about it.
22 February 2011
Al called. ‘We’re down to the last four candidates. We’ve got about a fortnight to get a full business plan together.’
I was in something like shock. There was now a 25% chance that the entire framework of our family’s world was going to be voluntarily collapsed into something that Al saw as an unalloyed good but for me looked insanely risky: it’s a bankrupt cake shop for chrissake. What am I going to do? Commute to bloody Cambridge every day to make buns?
The next fortnight was frenzied. The first call was to friends and contacts. Thomas Blythe, General Manager at the St. John restaurant group, is a great friend who has ‘worked every station’ in the catering world. He sat at the dining table and dictated nonstop for an hour the astonishing list of things we’d have to think about. Laundry, staff training, blasting out grease traps, deliveries, premises licences, recycling, till systems, insurance, late-night fridge emergencies, visits from the Environmental Health Officer and taking credit cards. Next in was Gerry Moss, career baker and now head of operations at Gail’s. Gerry’s list included shop layouts, display, coffee machines, bakery equipment, stock control, uniforms and a couple of hundred other things to consider on the retail and bakery sides of the operation. Next was Dan Hopwood, interior designer and, most usefully, a trained architect. There were some technical issues, but within minutes Dan was sketching out ways the space could be opened, lightened and made functional.
The business plan started to take shape. I’m not great with money but Al is. I’ve also known her long enough to be sure that her parameters of operation are conservative. If she said we could make this work financially, we could.
With Dan’s brilliant designs and an idea of the building costs, together with all the information we’d gleaned from Thomas and Gerry, Alison had created a paper model of the business that looked like it could actually happen. It was then that the realisation began to creep up on us that there was no way we’d be able to do this from a distance. We’d need to be on site all day every day. We also realised that if we let our London house and rented in Cambridge, we’d have enough surplus income to buffer the first crucial years of the new business. Suddenly, it looked like we might be moving.
11 March 2011
We were led through the imposing arches of Pembroke College for an interview with the Bursar, Chris Blencowe, who was responsible for running the 700-year-old college and its estates. Al was armed with beautifully bound and illustrated business plans. I carried a monumental Bakewell tart she’d baked that morning. Chris and his team went at the business plan like a pack of management consultants, but in the end, perhaps swayed by the Bakewell, they smiled.
Now every available waking moment was spent on the project. For Al, it simply meant packing two and a half jobs into her already ridiculous schedule. Dan, the interior designer, was a godsend, generating a new drawing to represent every bonkers whim. The local planning authority had to clear each change to the building’s interior and everything had to be backed up by accurate drawings. Meanwhile, we were deep in negotiation with the Official Receiver. The previous owner had finally got around to registering the company about eight months before going bust. This meant that although the shopfront, which under planning law couldn’t be changed, featured a huge carved gilt ‘Fitzbillies’, we couldn’t actually trade under that name without buying it back from the Receiver. We were also buying the fittings of the bakery – knackered fridges, elderly proving cabinets, a huge industrial rolling machine and an oven that was too big to be moved out of the building.
Nobody else was particularly interested in bidding for the equipment – so many high-street bakers go out of business every year that you can always pick up the kit on eBay for little more than the transport cost – but several people had caught on to the importance of the Fitzbillies name. A small and surreal bidding war developed as we tried to reunite the building with the name it had traded under since 1920.
There was also the vexed matter of the secret recipe for the Chelsea bun. Apparently it wasn’t part of the deal with the Receiver, but remained in the head of the ex-head baker Gill Abbs, who, with 40 years of experience cooking the 50 or so lines of baked goods in the shop window, had been snapped up by a big local commercial bakery after the bankruptcy. Unless we could do something about recovering the traditional recipes, we were going to be selling cupcakes. Luckily for us, after a little negotiation, Gill was soon back in her old job.
I started thinking about menus for savoury food. We could use the space behind the shop to run a traditional tea room, but that by itself would be economic suicide. Traditional teas are massively labour intensive and you can’t charge much for them. Our research kept turning up comments that ‘there’s nowhere decent to eat in Cambridge’. I found that difficult to understand, but then Cambridge isn’t an ordinary town. The academics – those with much of the disposable income and inclination to eat out – eat fantastically high-quality food from their own college kitchens. There are plenty of chain joints catering to students and their visiting parents, but Cambridge had been named ‘Clone Town’ a couple of years before when researchers discovered that there were more chains per head of population than anywhere else in the UK. That accusation obviously hurt. It kept coming up in our meetings with Pembroke, interviews with potential customers and conversations with local businesses.
We needed to run a proper lunch service – and eventually dinner too – in order to make the place work financially. We’d have to insert a savoury kitchen into the bakery, but we’d also need to choose our food carefully. The town wanted Fitzbillies to feel ‘non-chain’, the students needed it to be affordable, I wanted it to be British in tradition and the brand demanded it should fit in with the original feel of the bakery. I started jotting down lists of pies, big roasts done slowly in the dying heat of the baker’s oven, soups and savouries. It was fun. Unlike arguing with the council about drain lines or the interminable bloody discussion about which of 42 shades of white the walls should be, this was something I felt I could do well. But the last time I’d put on whites and bellied up to the range was 28 years and four stone ago. I couldn’t run a kitchen any more – we were going to need a chef.
Gerry and Thomas came with us to visit the site again as we planned layouts, positions for waiter stations and where the kitchen kit would fit. Thomas brought along an old friend, Rosie Sykes, a phenomenal chef and food writer who was well advanced with her own secret project for a restaurant in Cambridge. Rosie had trained with Joyce Molyneux at The Carved Angel, and worked with Shaun Hill, Alastair Little and Margot Henderson as well as at half a dozen other astonishingly good British restaurants. She’s firmly of the tradition of British cooking using local ingredients, and her low-key personal style we recognised as ideal for running a kitchen that was squeezed into an existing traditional bakery. Al and I knew we were going to have trouble attracting a good chef.
6 June 2011
The date Al handed in her notice was, remarkably appropriately, also the anniversary of D-Day. The first viewings from potential tenants indicated that we’d be able to let our London house for good money. All of which meant I could clear my head for the building work. I’d tackled several medium-sized projects – we’d done up a couple of houses from wrecks – but this was going to be the biggest job I’d undertaken by a long way. There is, though, one universal truth about building projects of any size. If you’re on the site, you’ll save money. Partly because you can make yourself useful with odd cleaning or labouring duties, which helps to distract the builders from the fact that you’re watching everyone like a particularly avaricious hawk. And if a part or material suddenly isn’t where it’s needed, you don’t lose a whole day of a tradesman’s time – you just get in the car and go buy the thing. But above all, decisions are made on the spot. You don’t come back in three days to find a wall has been erected a few inches too close to the loo door – you’ll be there when they start, so you can make sure it’s right.
Al came up to the site for a day, and as we wandered through the rubble, her phone beeped. It was the automatic alert she’d set up on the property search site. Almost incredibly there was an actual family house up for rent in central Cambridge. We’d been looking for weeks, and in a town where the colleges and big tech firms snap up most available family rentals for their own people, it had felt like nothing suitable would ever come up. We wanted to be close to the shop and to Liberty’s new school – she’d got into the same school her mum went to, which pleased her no end. Two phone calls later, still covered in cement dust, I was standing in the hall of a beautiful house just around the corner and overlooking the school gate. It was perfect; a beautiful, really comfortable family home – just what we were all going to need as a safe base over the next insane year. With the house and school sorted, the building on time and on budget, all we needed now was a chef…
A couple of weeks later, on my 47th birthday (or maybe 48th), Thomas dropped by again to see how everything was going. ‘You should talk to Rosie,’ he said, ‘I think she’s being messed around on her project. You could be good for each other.’ It was an almost unbelievable stroke of luck that Rosie was able to join us.
We’re very alike in almost all the things we believe about eating out in the UK, but Rosie has the added reputation for launching outstanding kitchens. She asked if we’d also consider hiring Tim, a soft-spoken south Londoner with Robert Smith hair and a legendary hand with terrines and pâtés. His most recent gig had been at the renowned Anchor & Hope in Southwark. Rosie had planned to have Tim with her on her project, and though we’d only have him for a month, he’d turn out to be a solid asset.
A couple of days later, I was screwing on the new table tops when Jack van Praag walked in off the street. He liked the look of the place, he said, and wondered if he might come and do a few shifts in the kitchen between his new childcare commitments. I was at first perhaps a little reticent. ‘Do you have much experience?’ I asked. ‘I used to run my own place, went travelling, worked at Rose Bakery in Paris and Chez Panisse.’ I put down my screwdriver to shake hands… it looked like we might have a full kitchen team for opening.
At the bakery the final touches were being put to the construction work. I built the big bar to hold the coffee machine. I suspected Al didn’t entirely agree with my desire for a ‘state-of-the-art’ coffee counter, but then she drinks herbal tea and pretends to like it. I might have happily left The Big Smoke for this bike-infested heritage play-park, but I was sure as hell bringing the best bits with me. My new workplace was going to feature the sort of coffee that would put Shoreditch to shame.
We set up a space to interview new staff. Most food businesses complain that it’s tough to find good people outside of the big cities. I can’t say I agree. We were lucky, I know. Kirsty had been the head waitress at the old Fitzbillies and she was a revelation. A superbly talented catering professional who’d been crushed when the business went under, her knowledge of the local audience, contacts, ideas and her calm brilliance in a crisis were the sort of assets you wouldn’t find in some of the best London crews. She also loved Fitzbillies in a way that reinforced our feeling that we were just the current fortunate caretakers of an immortal institution.
Others arrived in response to ads in the window. Caz, Stuart, Whitney, Holly, Fiona, Tom, Lucy, Issy and Abbi ranged from first-class front-of-house people to first-job school-leavers, but all came with a love of food and real enthusiasm for Fitzbillies.
One Wednesday I was working on the plumbing when a tall, slim gentleman in a flat cap with military bearing walked in. He sat with Al in the kitchen and they talked for an hour, pouring over some books he’d brought. ‘Who was that?’ I asked. According to the last owners, ‘Old Tom’ sort of ‘comes with the place’. He was an ex-paratrooper who had trained in the kitchens of the big London hotels after the war and had been at Fitzbillies on and off ever since. He’d survived three sets of owners, was around 85 years old (he said he’d stopped counting) and decorated cakes with heartbreaking beauty.
‘I feel like he just interviewed me,’ said Al. He agreed to fill in a time sheet, but could set his own hours. Within days he was in the kitchen, swinging trays of buns and huge 25kg drums of syrup into stacks like two men half his age.
19 August 2011
The new staff arrived and began a thorough clean as the builders packed up and retreated. The false wall protecting the kitchen came down and, after a 5.30am start, I gleefully joined in the loading of the very last skip. Every restaurateur I’ve asked tells the same story about opening day – driving the builders out the back door as the first customers come in through the front. Fitzbillies, it seemed, was alive again.
The first trays of hot Chelsea buns began flying out of the cleaned and renovated ovens as Rosie turned out ‘sample’ food that would make an angel weep. I wondered if the builders had any idea where the hands that built their bacon sandwich had worked.
On Thursday night we rolled home late. The next day, we began a three-day ‘Chelsea bun Weekend’. The tills weren’t working, and we weren’t up to speed in the bakery, but the plan was to turn out buns and tea to the people of Cambridge for a few days, just to say thanks and to get the team working well together. We’d all muck in to serve, give guided tours of the bakery and generally be lovely to everyone. The doors would open at 10.00. At 09.30 they were already queueing along the street and around the corner…
While you’re setting up a business, opening day is the target, the end goal, what you plan for. But, of course, it is just the beginning. You wake up the next day and do it again and, in the case of Fitzbillies, you do it again every day (except Christmas Day and New Year’s Day) all year round. And the next year, and the one after. Getting Fitzbillies open again was a great achievement, but it had a long way to go. While the standard of the baking was always good, thanks to Gill, in other ways we were rank amateurs. We adopted the approach, which we still maintain, of just trying to make things better day by day. Spotting the next problem and solving it. Hiring people who can help us do that.
Fitzbillies Bridge Street
By January 2015, we were three and a half years into our new life and our new business. The café was ever-more popular, with queues at the door every weekend. While every day was still unpredictable, it felt like we could just about take a breath. Time for the next project then…
We cycle to Fitzbillies through the centre of Cambridge. One day we noticed that a beautiful, double-fronted Victorian shop, right opposite Magdalene Bridge punt station, was up for rent. We knew instantly that it should be our next branch – it was the other end of town from Trumpington Street, a busy street and miles from the nearest decent cup of coffee. It took over a year to persuade St John’s College that we were the right tenants and to get the change of use from shop to café, but eventually, in May 2016, Fitzbillies Bridge Street opened its doors.
It’s a coffee shop really, smaller than the original branch, and was initially supplied with cakes, pastries and all the makings of brunch from the Trumpington Street kitchen and bakery. It was a success from day one and with that success came a new set of challenges. Production capacity. It was around this time that we stopped serving dinner at Fitzbillies Trumpington Street in order to concentrate on the ever-busier daytime trade, and we also started thinking seriously about moving the bakery offsite to give the bakers more room and to fulfil our ambition to make our own bread.
We searched long and hard for suitable premises to relocate our bakery. We needed a big space, very close to central Cambridge in order to get the Chelsea buns and other cakes to the two branches quickly first thing in the morning and so that our bakers could get to work by bike. Before we found one, we heard that Cobs Bakery, the long-time supplier of the delicious white baps we use for our bacon rolls, was going to close. We couldn’t bear the loss of the baps and it gave us a ready-made opportunity to start producing all of our own bread, so Cobs joined the Fitzbillies family in July 2018, with Tim’s brother Matt as our first delivery driver.
By that summer, with Trumpington Street and Bridge Street getting busier and busier, the need for a bigger bakery for our cake bakers became pressing. Eventually we found a lovely, light, modern space close to the railway station that was big enough for the Cobs bread bakers and the cake bakers. And in December 2018, with only one day’s break in the Chelsea bun production, all the bakers moved into their new home.
Looking forward
We write this in May 2019, looking back at nearly eight years of work at Fitzbillies. Eight years of constant improvement, just trying to do better every day. Making more delicious food, making more customers happy (most of the time), creating more jobs, keeping the institution going. Of course we wish we’d known then what we know now. We would still have done it, but we’re not sure we’d have the energy to do it again!
The next thing is to do justice to our 100th birthday in 2020. A vanishingly small percentage of companies live to be 100. A business-school textbook will tell you that it takes changing with the times, being prepared to adapt to survive. We believe we’ve done that while staying true to what made Fitzbillies beloved from the start – bloody good cake… and buns and coffee and brunch. The day we forget that, we know our customers will remind us.
