9 months ago
Welcome to the Inside Scoop, the series where we go behind the curtain of local businesses and uncover what makes them so darn good.
We broke bread with Robin Gill, chef and owner of Darby’s (amongst many other ventures!) in his Nine Elms based restaurant. Of course, everyone knows Darby’s for its fantastic offerings for lunch and dinner, but what about breakfast? Here’s all there is to know from Robin himself.
My name is Robin Gill and we are in Darby’s, a bakery, Oyster Bar and Grill. Today though we’re here to talk about my bakery! We’re a New York style big Brasserie, but what’s different about us is the craft. We do everything in house and it’s something that I’ve spent years and years trying to bring in and perfect. And that’s what we’ve done.
What we try to do is have a small range of products across our bakery. We have about six or seven pastries, but the lets get into the absolute classics. First, the croissant. There’s about 32 different layers after all the folds that we put into it. It’s a 24 hour proving process before we bake fresh every single morning.
Then we have a seasonal Danish, this is something that we always have- a Danish which changes all the time. Blood oranges are bang in season right now, so we’ve got that with a good creme patisserie underneath to make it moist. It’s hard not to make a mess. Our pan au chocolate is world famous! Again, there are loads of layers in there and we use a really, really good, strong dark chocolate, as well.
The whole bakery journey started back in 2012/2013 when we launched The Dairy. What we wanted to do there was to celebrate bread and change something that had always traditionally been a gap filler. You know, drop some bread down just to save some time while we take an order in a restaurant. Whereas we actually served it 3-4 courses in as a ‘breaking bread’ ritual and we’d serve it with charcuterie that was made in house and a really special butter. We’d do a smoked bone marrow butter. And it was incredible sourdough! At the time we were baking out of a very small oven, and now we’re very fortunate to be able to bring a full blown bakery that’s available for you to be able to come in, as a daily ritual, and buy it.
What does every neighbourhood want? It’s a great bakery. I know I do anyway.
Keep your eye out for the next instalment in The Inside Scoop series.
