Former business manager happily rolling in the dough
While most people were learning to make sourdough for fun during the early days of lockdown, Larry Harris was looking to monetize his breadmaking skills.
Formerly the senior manager of business operations at MacEwan University, Harris has long had a passion for baking. It was only after a honeymoon trip to France with his wife a number of years back, however, that the budding pastry maker really began to think about developing his skills.
Add to that the round of sweeping cuts at Macewan that left him jobless over the summer, and you can see why Harris was prodded toward his recent course change into the world of water, flour, and sourdough starter.
“I had to keep the idle hands busy,” Harris laughs while recounting the genesis of his family's new microbakery, La Bonne Vie. “During the early days of COVID, I was baking sourdough bread and buns for the Glass Monkey during my spare time, until I trained one of the owner's staff on how to do it. Then it all changed in June.”
What changed for Harris and other bakers working from their homes was an easing of restrictions on the preparation and sale of low-risk, homemade foods.
“Before that you had to have a commercial kitchen if you wanted to sell from home,” Harris explains. “Now I could use my own kitchen to make sourdough, croissants, and cookies. When that happened, I eventually decided to see if there would be any interest in my baking, to see if we could make a go of it.”
Turns out they absolutely could. La Bonne Vie Bakery officially kicked off a few weeks ago, and the orders have increased exponentially, with Harris, his wife and son Joseph all pitching in to get the loaves into their double oven. The first weekend saw the family turning out 16 loaves (of different varieties) and eight dozen cookies, while last Saturday saw them doubling the loaves, adding a large batch of brownies and selling out in two hours. That's not a bad start for a small business working with a home kitchen.
“It's a little bit constraining to produce that much in such small quarters, so I've started poking around for commercial space,” says Harris, who is up at 4 a.m. on a Saturday morning to turn on the oven and baking intensely until noon. “That way, we can switch things up a little and produce things like sausage rolls and pastries with custard filling, which we can't do under the reg
ulations. That might be looking toward January or thereabouts.”
In the meantime, the family is keeping up with the growing list of orders that come in when they post their weekly offerings on Facebook and Instagram.
“The jalapeno cheddar sourdough orders have been going through the roof,” he says. “I've actually got a list of the side for people who want to order it the next time I bake them.”
RIVER CITY REVIVAL TAKES A BREATHER
That most rock 'n' roll of
restaurants, River City Revival House, is shutting down for a week while they take stock of the current situation.
Posting on Facebook, owner Tyson Cale Boyd lamented that “with the announcement of the new restrictions yesterday
(Nov. 24), it simply doesn't make sense to remain open through this time putting our staff and community at risk.”
In a short followup interview, Boyd clarified that the restaurant will close for a week (starting Nov. 25) while they figure out their options.
“It will likely be longer, unfortunately,” says Boyd. “When we first started takeout was good for about a week, and then it just didn't even make sense to carry forward as orders dropped significantly. That seemed to be the story across the board, though there were definitely people who continued to support us.”
Restaurants are still opening in the midst of uncertainty, however.
A couple that you might want to check out are Damso Izakaya on Whyte Avenue, which had a soft opening on Nov. 11, and Wayback Burgers on Jasper Avenue.