LET THEM EAT BREAD
CAP FERRET, France — Pascal Rigo was just 7 when he fell in love with baking. Summering with his family here on the Atlantic coast, he began an apprenticeship in a small boulangerie here, one of dozens that dotted LègeCap-ferret, a spit of land about an hour’s drive southwest of Bordeaux.
Over the years, as he built a fortune in the baking business in the United States, one boulangerie after another closed until there was only one left in this tiny town at the tip of the peninsula where he has a home — a turn of events Rigo considers an affront to French baking.
His opinion of that bakery’s bread isn’t much higher. “People say the French are eating less bread because of gluten-free, because of low-carb,” Rigo said, sitting in a cafe here and dunking a flaky croissant into a hot chocolate made the French way, with melted chocolate diluted by warm milk. “But bread like that — that is the reason.”
All across France, the local boulangerie — the mom-andpop shop that turns out classically crusty baguettes, eggy brioches, sturdy boules and croissants as light as air — has fallen into decline in recent decades as some people have adopted carbohydrate-free diets and others have grown accustomed to buying bread at supermarkets and convenience stores that make their own, using cheap ingredients. In the process, bread aficionados lament, the quality of the average loaf has plummeted, and many traditional bakeries have closed.
And so Rigo, an ebullient baker with a seemingly perpetual gaptoothed grin, has embarked on a personal crusade to rescue this pillar of French cuisine one bakery at a time, starting here with La P’tite Boulangerie du Ferret, a shop that he opened last summer. He sees it as the first in a nationwide chain of what he calls microboulangeries.
He has also started scouting for shuttered boulangeries in small towns, hoping to overhaul their finances and reopen them. The plan is to connect young bakers to defunct bakeries in communities with 2,000 or more people, 20 to 30 miles from a major city.
“Bread is part of our heritage,” said Rigo, evoking the popular demand for bread that prompted the infamous phrase “Let them eat cake” during the French Revolution. “I’d like to restore that for my country.”
Applying a modern multistore strategy to a traditional, handmade product may seem a contradiction. But Rigo, 56, turned that combination into a hugely successful career. He is best known for founding La Boulange, a small chain of Bay Area cafe-bakery shops that he sold in 2013 to Starbucks for $100 million and is now resuscitating under a slightly tweaked name, La Boulangerie.
His vision for France is a network of tiny bakeries, each operated by one baker, some with the help of a sales clerk. He plans to open at least four more this year in arcades, called Les Halles de Bacalan, that are being built by the developer Biltoki in southwestern France. The first will open on Oct. 15.
He is negotiating a lease to open a P’tite Boulangerie in the 10th Arrondissement in Paris, and working to strike a deal with Biocoop, an organic grocery, to put the microbakeries in some of the chain’s 400 stores around the country by year’s end.
“The problem is with the economics of the boulangerie, not the bread,” Rigo said. “I’m going to show that you can make good bread and good money.”
After much study, he has determined that the old business model simply doesn’t work anymore. “The real estate would cost 400,000 euros, and then they had to buy equipment, so by the time they opened, the average boulanger was 800,000 euros in the red,” he said. “They then would be working 20 hours a day because they couldn’t afford to hire anyone to help them, and still, they had trouble turning any profit.”
He plans to get around that problem by shrinking each store, reducing the number of people needed to run it, buying ingredients centrally to enhance the shops’ bargaining power and limiting the number of products sold. “To try to make profit, boulangers were trying to sell anything and everything, instead of trying to sell more of the things people really want — the baguettes des copains, the ficelles, the boules,” Rigo said.
To make matters worse, the mills that for years supplied flour to French bakers started becoming competitors in the 1990s, investing in chain bakeries that pump out pain quotidien on an industrial scale often using preformed frozen dough.
“They would sell two baguettes for the price of one, three for the price of two, things like that, and soon, every time a Marie Blachère store opened” — part of a large chain of millbacked bakeries — “three boulangeries in three small towns would close,” Rigo said.
The number of boulangeries in France dropped to 28,000 in 2015, from 37,800 just 20 years earlier. Alexander Goransson, the author of a 2014 report on bread in France and a lead analyst at Euromonitor, a research firm, said that rate has slowed during the past decade, although bakeries continue to close.
Goransson said Rigo may be putting his plan in motion at just the right time, because more French consumers are showing an interest in high-quality breads — they call them “artisanale” — that use minimal ingredients and are baked fresh.
On a blustery, overcast Friday morning, Virginie De Laval was picking up four baguettes at La P’tite Boulangerie in Cap Ferret. “I’m buying it because it’s good bread,” she said.
She said she sometimes purchased supermarket bread, but only in a pinch. “I think people today are returning more and more to foods that are artisanal, without preservatives and other ingredients that are unfamiliar,” De Laval said. “There’s a better appreciation of the way things were done in the past.”
Over a span of two hours, 67 customers — just 600 people live here during the offseason — pulled up to the tiny bakery to buy baguettes, chewy ficelles and buttery croissants, all made by Maud Moinard, 23, the boulanger who runs the 290-squarefoot space.
She has all the equipment she needs — a water chiller, a mixer, an oven, a sink, a proofer, big sacks of flour and a refrigerator, built in under the classic marble display case — and works her doughs while she sells the breads. She knows her customers so well that before many even step out of their cars, she is already twisting a piece of thin, noisy brown paper around their customary purchases.
“Sure, it’s sometimes busy doing sales and baking, too, but that’s how I know what I need to make,” Moinard said.
The bakery sold a daily average of 2,000 baguettes des copains last summer, until volume dropped to about 400 when the vacationers left, Rigo said. In comparison, Rigo’s La Boulangerie shops in San Francisco each sell about 50 baguettes daily.
La P’tite Boulangerie also sells sandwiches and pastries made in a patisserie Rigo has opened in Cap Ferret, where traditional sweets are made with a local twist. A classic gâteau Basque, for instance, is made with pine nuts that grow in the forests here and a Bordeaux rum, and is playfully called Gâteau Presque Basque, or “nearly” a gâteau Basque. And there are a few imports: The shop sells bags of the granola that is a hit at his San Francisco shops.
Carole Garcia, the town’s adjutant mayor, stopped in to buy a couple of savory ficelles to enjoy with aperitifs that evening, and sampled a bite of the gâteau. She said she buys loaves from the other boulangeries here as well — “relationships, you know; I’m adjutant mayor” — but the P’tite Boulangerie bread is “without comparison.”
“It’s like bread used to be,” she said.
Garcia has known Rigo for years. He and his business partners here played soccer together when they were children, and he has become something of a local celebrity as the boy who left home and made good.
He grew up east of here in Paillet, where his mother was the postmaster. The family spent summers in Cap Ferret; Rigo apprenticed here and at two other French bakeries.
After working as a baker in various restaurants in Paris, he moved to Los Angeles in 1989 with plans to start a wine-importing business. But he began baking bread for an old friend, chef Michel Richard, who had struggled to find loaves he considered good enough for Citrus, his acclaimed restaurant in the city.
Soon Rigo also was making breads for restaurants like L’hermitage and the dining room at the Checkers hotel, where Thomas Keller was chef. “We were making bread for about 70 of the best restaurants in Los Angeles,” Rigo said. “It was hard work, but fun.”