BAKED IN BENGALURU : Longing for bread in Shivajinagar

BENGALURU: Excelsior

Bakery

, set up in 1930 by a Tamil baker and a British woman, continues to draw loyalists with its old-style loaves, cakes and biscuits.

It is 12 in the afternoon and shelves at Excelsior Bakery in

Shivajinagar

are fast filling up with ribbon cakes, cummtee cakes, kal kals, rose cookies, fresh cream cakes, masala biscuits and pastries. Mithun P polishes off one egg puff, sips packaged guava juice and moves onto a warm aloo bun. Breakfast over, he looks up to see a fresh batch of dainty Japanese cakes, their hard cashew base topped with swirls of cream. Mithun is from the neighbourhood and is on a break from his workplace — a textile shop in the nearby Russell Market. He grew up around the sights and smells of Excelsior Bakery and has his favourites. “I like cream bun, egg puff and aloo bun,” says Mithun, who is joined by local shopkeepers and famished autorickshaw drivers looking for a quick but substantial bite on the run.

Back in the 1940s, young men would troop into Excelsior to gain strength in a different way. The store lore goes that those who wanted to get into the army, which was on a recruiting spree during the World War II, would opt to knead the dough for a few days to build upper body strength. “In return, my great-great-grandfather would give them a fresh loaf of bread,” smiles 27-year-old Saipreeth Muralidharan, the fourth-generation custodian of the bakery with his father A Muralidharan.

DOUGH IS SET

Bakeries, a much-loved British institution that continue to thrive in Indian cities, are dime a dozen in Bengaluru. Excelsior, which is among the first set of bakeries that came up in the early 1900s and were run by Indian confectioners trained by the British, has an interesting association. It was started by Sahadevan, an enterprising Tamilian from Krishnagiri, in association with a very British Mrs Emery.

Muralidharan doesn’t know much about this unusual Indo-British partnership except to add that Sahadevan, an expert confectioner, who started his career at Honour’s Bakery run by an Englishman, helped out another set of Britishers run Bangalore Bakery. When it shut down, he opened Excelsior in 1930 with the help of one of the partners, the enigmatic Mrs Emery.

“My late brother, who was also an expert confectioner, used to keep the tokens we issued back in the days,” says Muralidharan. The story goes that Britishers and Indians used to queue up on Seppings Road early in the morning to buy bread. “People used to come at 6 am, collect tokens and wait for three hours to buy bread. Apparently, only the first 100 people would get our milk bread,” says Saipreeth, a techie turned baker.

The shop used to have around 20 employees who ensured that the dough kneaded on a five-inch-thick kitchen counter was loaded onto a huge wood-fired oven to churn out loaves of breads, buns, biscuits and cakes. A bus stop right in front of the shop meant that customers walked in through the day. Excelsior also started supplying a massive 70-kg cake for St Mary’s feast every year, while their Christmas cakes gained a cult following.

CHANGING TASTES

Now the modest kitchen behind the store houses a commercial rotisserie oven and dough kneading machine. The interiors are a bright orange and there are pastries, donuts, chicken rolls and burgers on the shelves, a change brought about by Saipreeth after he took over three years ago.

Changes had to happen because Excelsior sits bang in the middle of Shivajinagar, a neighbourhood that lost its sheen as a premier shopping hub. “Earlier, people used to go to Russell Market to buy fresh produce and many would drop in at Excelsior. Twenty years ago, I remember going to Shivajinagar and Excelsior used to be a popular place,” recalls food blogger Kapil Bellubbi. Now, it is not so mainly because hardly anyone visits Shivajinagar. “The food — chicken puffs, cakes, especially Japanese cake — is excellent and it still has a quaint charm about it,” says Bellubbi.

There have been buy-out offers from retail chains but the family has not yet succumbed. Maybe that’s because of the fan following for their bread. “We don’t add any preservative to it – it’s just flour and milk. But it remains fresh for at least three days,” says Saipreeth. But even he was surprised when an old Bengaluru resident called from Kerala requesting him to ship milk bread to a small town there. “We told him that it might not remain fresh but he wouldn’t listen,” he recalls. Maybe, a loaf of fresh bread is all it takes.

(A column on old bakeries in the city's quieter corners and their success recipes)