She couldn’t find the perfect baguette for his children, so she opened a sourdough bakery in Veszprém

There is a prosaic reason for the opening: my two grown-up children simply made me do it. At first, I didn’t believe in it, but then I started planning. Of course, this did not happen overnight. From the moment the decision was taken, it took another year and a half of work to put the concept together. We didn’t have a gastronomic business in the family yet, we were doing something completely different. In addition, I was not a baker either. As a wife and mother, I’ve cooked for 15 people or baked bread for an event for 30, but that is a completely different genre, a “different café” I might say. I didn’t work in any other sourdough bakery to get professional experience: I put the concept together from my own wellspring, based on my own literary experiences. My other motivation behind the whole project was that I wanted to bring what I was doing at home to as many people as possible. For me, this bakery now feels like I am hosting guests every day.

I started baking bread at home 20 years ago because I couldn’t find any that I liked, or that was appropriate for my health. Then the sourdough bakeries came along and I was no longer forced to bake twice a week because I bought the breads at the organic market or sourdough bakeries. Still, even though there were sourdough bakeries in Budapest that I loved, I couldn’t get the real thing I was looking for, so I started baking again.

The baguette. My children wanted baguettes. To this day, I still don’t understand this madness, I think bread, buns, rolls are all much better, but you can’t say no to your children.

It is indeed difficult, but I think we have managed to find this balance. I just wanted to make a sourdough bakery. My personal belief is that if you are going to do something, you have to do your best. I have been eating organic produce at home for 20 years. Concerning the basic foods that we eat a lot of, such as potatoes, carrots, bread, etc., I insist on choosing the chemical-free version. Because of this, I was sure that I would only open a bakery with organic grains. If this could not have been done economically, I would not have done it.

I think about this now as I did at the beginning of the planning: there is a customer base that comes because they can afford it, there are those who are health conscious, but there are also those who simply like the taste of what we make. Most of our customers are recurring customers, which is great to see. Those who were here the last summer for the last time, feel like they know the products, they know who is at the counter, therefore they feel the place theirs. This was exactly the aim, to make our customers feel at home.

I think it’s the team. The 6 people I work with now all feel ownership of the bakery: they are friendly at the counter, they know and love the products, and they are genuinely happy. The bakers are also people who come with me, brainstorm ideas, add their own thoughts, we can work as a real creative community, and our latest products are already born this way. In fact, we already have three products for which I have only flashed a half-thought (or not even that much). My original aim was to make people who enter the shop feel that they are my guests. Now we work so well together as a team that I can say: they are coming to visit us as my guests.