Breadheads - 20/05/07
Many Notting Hill locals complain bitterly about the loss of small businesses along Portobello Road, especially when they are replaced by the likes of Starbucks. One example is the excellent and long-established Spanish Deli, P. de la Fuente, which closes next week. I will miss it.

I can accept that businesses come and go. The main reason that businesses disappear is the steeply rising commercial rents on Portobello Road. There’s a local campaign group, Friends of Portobello, which wants to have the street declared a business conservation area to protect small shopkeepers. Currently there is no legal basis for such an entity and, personally, I have strong doubts about insulating local traders from market forces. To me, that looks perilously like the path to stagnation.

So, in the spirit of welcoming new businesses into the area, I dropped into the recently opened Gail's Bakery on Portobello Road to give it a try.

Its stripped wood floors and exposed brick reminded me of a contemporary New York deli. Many new businesses along Portobello have a distinctly American feel, presumably to cater for our growing population of outlandishly wealthy Americans, attracted by the bloody film I suppose.

What Gail’s sells is lots of sandwiches, cakes and bread, at prices so high they make your eyes water and your wallet sob. I bought a croissant with some fancy ham and cheese in it, a piece of cheesecake and a white sourdough loaf. That came to £8.10 ($16).

Sixteen fucking dollars! For that, these had better be the best filled croissant, the most delicious cheesecake and the tastiest bread I’ve ever eaten. But were they?

No they weren’t.

The croissant was too flaky and a bit dry, like one of those ones you buy from the supermarket partly cooked and then finish in the oven at home; the cheesecake was too sweet and a bit soggy. The bread was just mediocre.

Since I am a notorious food snob, as my wife never tires of reminding me, I like a decent loaf of bread and I love an authentic croissant. I can get a delicious loaf of Spanish white bread for 65 pence a couple of hundred metres from my home at the Lisboa Delicatessen. A truly superb croissant from Mr Christian’s on Blenheim Crescent costs £1.20, not cheap, but well worth the money. So, why would I shop at Gail’s? Well, of course, I’m not going to.

But it’s not their over-priced, sub-standard food that annoys me the most. It’s the management consultant style of their miserable business that really gets on my tits. You need to visit their website to get the true flavour of that.

‘Remember when your local high street was full of independents? Today every high street is like stepping onto the set of the Truman show – it all looks the same. These Goliath-chains put small shops out of business [and] force property prices up,’ their website says.

Hang on a minute, Gail’s displaced an independent art gallery whose owner complained bitterly in the local paper about losing his site due to a massive rent rise. And they may not be a large chain yet but they’ve got another shop in Hampstead. If they don’t have ambitious plans for expansion, I’ll eat one of their horrible croissants every day for a year.

And why does a bakery with two branches have a press officer? She’s certainly been busy – Gail’s might not know how to bake a decent loaf of bread but they are expert at securing favourable press coverage; just check the website press section.

Now I’ve nothing against the two guys behind Gail’s, even although it turns out they are both ex-management consultants. But this pretence that they are some sort of tiny but perfectly-formed artisan type business is poodlefakery of the worst kind.

But the best joke is on them. You can sign up on their site to become a Very Important Breadhead, meaning you’ll get annoying marketing emails from them for the rest of your life.

They’re presumably too young to remember, but in the olden days, ’breadhead’ was the ultimate hippy insult, levelled at those who were morbidly obsessed with money.