‘French pastries all look amazing… but I wish more British bakers would look at what we used to have’: Richard Hart on the joys of jammy dodgers and iced buns

If there is such a thing as a rock-and-roll baker, then it is surely Richard Hart. For the past two decades, he’s travelled the globe, won industry plaudits galore and set up a string of award-winning bakeries around the world — but with his tattoos, stubble and fondness for swearing, he comes across more like an East End geezer than Britain’s most lauded baker. He’s attracted his share of controversy, too — he recently offended half of Mexico by asserting it doesn’t ‘have much of a bread culture’ — which makes his latest project, a British-themed bakery at one of London’s landmark hotels, Claridge’s, all the more surprising.

‘It's funny, because I've never actually been a baker in England,’ he says, rubbing a hand through his beard. ‘I lived in the [US] for eleven years, Copenhagen for six, now I'm in Mexico. But I've wanted to come back to the UK since I left. It's just taken a long time to come to fruition.’

Richard has certainly had a peripatetic career. Having fallen in love with sourdough in the mid 2000s in California while working at Ubuntu and Della Fattoria, he later became head baker at San Francisco’s renowned Tartine, where he stayed for seven years. In 2018, he set up Hart Bageri in Copenhagen with the experimental Danish chef René Redzepi, and since 2022, he’s been based in Mexico City, where he runs Green Rhino with his partner, tea maestro Henrietta Lovell. As if that wasn’t enough, his most recent book, Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Making, won the baking category for the James Beard Book Award in 2025.

His latest project is tucked away on Brook’s Mews, a backstreet behind Claridge’s, hitherto favoured by celebrities making incognito entrances and exits to the hotel. The idea for the bakery has been in the works for years, Richard explains. Several years ago, one of his chefs made him a giant Double Decker — his favourite chocolate bar — as a birthday surprise. This got him thinking about all the sweet treats he loved as a child, and how they have almost entirely fallen out of fashion with today’s bakers, who seem to be obsessed with fancy French patisseries and San Francisco-style sourdough.

‘To be honest, I wish more British bakers would look at what we used to have,’ he says. ‘We all loved Mr. Kipling's as a kid. I remember going to my grandparents for hot toast with butter and marmalade. To look at those things from the past and give them a new life is really exciting for me. Those food memories are a wonderful thing, you know. They’re like magic.’

An ever-so-British bakery seems a natural fit for Claridge’s, and browsing the shelves induces an instant hit of childhood nostalgia. Alongside the granary loaves, country bloomers and Marmite cheese straws are tea-room treats straight from a village fête: jammy dodgers, iced fingers, Bakewell tarts, lardy cakes, fruit turnovers, walnut whips. Of course, this being a Richard Hart bakery, everything is baked to perfection, prepared with the kind of reverence and attention to detail a French boulanger would devote to their baguettes, eclairs, madeleines and macarons. But it hasn’t been without challenges.

‘The thing is, French pastries all look amazing, but English baked goods typically don’t,’ Richard says, ever the provocateur. ‘A Belgian bun is actually pretty ugly, you know? Making it look nice is a real challenge.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘I've also got an issue with scones. In my opinion, a scone has to be baked and then eaten. It's perfect in that moment. A scone that sits too long is just sad. That’s why we don’t sell them.’

Richard insisted from the start that the design of the bakery should be open-plan to allow customers to watch the bakers at work and smell the aromas: toasted malt, browning sugar, the yeasty richness of fresh-baked bread. Since opening its doors in January 2026, it’s proved predictably popular, especially with non-British customers — for many of whom it’s their first taste of a jammy dodger or malted milk loaf. Does he think its success has been helped by the global popularity of The Great British Bake Off? ‘Of course,’ he laughs. ‘Paul Hollywood visited one of my bakeries a few years ago, and my mum still basically feels like it was the highlight of my career.’

The difference with his takes on these quintessentially British bakes, Richard says, is that whereas traditional recipes typically used fast-acting instant yeast, he employs different methods of fermentation to make them more digestible. Most crucial of all is the flour: Richard buys all his from the same Italian supplier he’s been working with for years, Molino Paulo Mariani, a family-run mill in Le Marche, a few miles from the Adriatic coast.

‘The first time I visited, I’d never seen anything so beautiful,’ he says. ‘Each piece of wheat had different root systems, different root structures. There were butterflies and bugs flying around. It felt like I’d died and gone to baker's heaven. I'm sure there’s some amazing wheat grown in Britain, but I haven't even looked because I love the people I work with. If you're a baker and you're buying wheat, you need to go and figure out where it’s coming from.’

While there are currently no plans to expand the bakery to other locations, as ever with Richard Hart, the cogs are already whirring. ‘There’s so many places we could go with it,’ he says. ‘I mean, imagine it being like an old, comfy lounge, like your nan’s front room. How good would that be?’

For now, however, he’s happy just to get his head down and bake.

‘Being a baker teaches you humility,’ he says. ‘Today, my bread could be great; tomorrow it could be terrible. Bread has life. It needs nurturing, love, attention. There's a mystery to it which makes it exciting. Something happened in the universe that day to make it work, but it’s impossible to replicate. And like everyone, sometimes I screw it up. Twenty years later, I've literally got my head stuck in a mix every day, you know, still trying to make that perfect loaf.’