Feel the knead

profiles a baker working in York's historic heart.

IT'S funny what you can find behind the door of a baker's. At Via Vecchia, in Shambles, York, you will discover bread in all shapes, sizes and flavours. You will also chance on a chef from The Ritz, another from Claridges and a culinary veteran of the Falklands War. All in the one man.

Alistair Lawton, chef turned self-taught baker, worked in London for years, learning his craft in the kitchens of the great hotels; and then he ran away to sea on the QE2.

He spent three and a half years on board. In 1982, the liner was returning from New York when an emergency call came through from the Government. The ship had been requisitioned for use in the Falklands. After an extensive re-fit at Southampton, when the liner was gutted of all its luxury, she sailed to the South Atlantic.

Down in the kitchens, Alistair carried a PoW card in case of capture. This bore his civilian rank of "first roast cook". He remembers South Georgia when the QE2 dropped off the Fifth Brigade. "It was absolutely bloody freezing," he says, adding that many of those soldiers were to die.

Alistair, 43, came to York in 1992, originally running Via Vecchia as a delicatessen, switching four years later to simply a baker's. He made his own pizzas for the deli and started playing around with the dough. "I experimented with small bread rolls and slowly the bread emerged."

There is, he says, "a lot of rubbish written about bread recipes". He has his own methods: "It's just a technique I have developed. The bread has partly been a case of throwing it in the oven and seeing what comes out."

From such beginnings, he now bakes 12 sorts of bread in the week, including wholemeal, malted, plain white, rustic French-style, ciabatta, assorted flavoured loaves; Saturday sees the number of varieties upped to 17. He also supplies his bread to restaurants around York, including Tricksters Lane, El Piano, the Rubicon, Fenwicks and various tea rooms.

The shop is open from Tuesday to Saturday. The working day starts at 2am, when Alistair begins to mix the dough in his small bakery upstairs. The first bread comes out of the oven at six and he bakes until around ten. The extra variety on Saturday sees Alistair starting at 7pm on Friday and working through until 4pm the next day.

After years of working six long days a week, he now has Monday off, having decided that "life was too short" to spend six days baking.

But for all that, this is the life for him: "I love it," says Alistair. "It's down to 12 hours a day and I think that's pretty good and I love doing it."

We are talking upstairs, in the bakery. It is 11 in the morning, the end of the day almost for Alistair. He looks tired but there is a sort of weary exhilaration about him: he may be floury and exhausted but he is his own man, producing food he believes in.

Despite sitting in York's most famous street, Via Vecchia sells almost exclusively to locals, mostly regulars. "Ninety nine per cent of what we do is local. Tourists are very minimal. It's locals. Our quietest time of the year is in July and August when locals are away on holiday."

He always sells out by the end of the day, and his customers seem to enjoy what he is doing: making traditional, simple bread, either by hand, or mixed by machine and rolled and shaped by hand.

Although the pieces of dough are weighed to ensure each loaf is the same size, there is something gloriously haphazard about Alistair's bread. Each loaf looks individual, having come from the hands of one man. The cheese loaves, for instance, spill uneven discs of cooked cheese, similar to what is left under the grill-pan when you've made cheese on toast. This is bread that looks, and tastes, like food instead of bread designed by a supermarket committee or trundled off a factory line.

As for the cheese and Marmite bread, a friend of mine raves that this needs no accompaniment. And yes, it is a favourite creation, though not cheap to make. Alistair goes to get a giant jar of Marmite.

"How much do you think that costs me?"

"Er, three pounds?"

"Six pounds," he counters, in gloomy triumph.

He is, so far as he knows, the only individual baker working in the centre of York, as all the others buy in bread or are part of a chain.

From where he bakes, surrounded by his ovens, he can look down at the world below his bakery window. "Look, that's York for you," he says at one point, as a burger-eating man walks along Shambles. There is something amusing about this seen from above, the burger disappearing into the unseen mouth. The man does not stop to buy bread.

Alistair was born in Luton, which influenced his present location. Why York? "I just liked it - it's a nice place. Have you ever been to Luton? Luton's a hole."

- We intend to profile local food producers once a month. If you have a favourite local producer you would like to see featured, or if you run such a business, please write to Julian Cole, Features, Evening Press, 76-86 Walmgate, York, YO1 9YN or email features@ycp.co.uk

Updated: 08:53 Saturday, October 20, 2001