HOSPITALITY
for my Vespa,” Luca grins. “It was fun. When you’re 15, you just feel like you’re part of something. At the end of that, I got my first tattoo – and then... I was a chef.” The young chef worked his way around Italy: he spent winters in kitchens in the north west of the country, cut off by mountains. Then in cosmopolitan Milan, climbing his way up the ladder one rung at a time. Then Greece for a year, where he became a sous chef and met the friends who first encouraged him to move to London. After a brief, unsuccessful return to Italy, which led Luca to swear never to live in the country again, he drove his van across Europe to Blackheath, London, where he made a home on four wheels – then, eventually, he gave in to his friends’ badgering and moved to their sofa in Stoke Newington. Luca met his wife around the same time: “She moved in, and then we just... stayed together,” he laughs. “When I met her she was working in Medway, in Kent – she started as a locum where she is now, and just climbed up the ranks. It’s a totally different world,” he acknowledges.
IMAGES Some of the baked goods available at the Grain Culture Bake
Shop, including sourdough and focaccia bread
Throughout his career, Luca has had an obsession with bread. “People overlook it,” he says, when asked why it matters. He always knew a bread- based business was in his future, and the young couple had this in the back of their minds while searching for a place outside the capital to call home. They found Ely by chance, and fell in love with the perfect commuter town, deciding to invest in a home rather than building a business – in part because Luca was ready for a break from kitchens: “I worked right until the day the removal guys came to pack up.”
Once settled in Cambridgeshire, Luca started working a few days a week with Jack, which – along with caring for his children and supporting his commuting wife – filled up a great deal of the young chef’s time. But eventually an opportunity presented itself: like many of Cambridge’s food businesses, Grain Culture started life in a garage. “Imagine just a standard, new-build garage – that was the bakery,” he grins. “I had a double-door fridge for the dough, basically the size of the shutter, and then I had two tiny mixers, 25 litres each, and two tiny ovens. I had a door, and a bench, and a strip about two metres long and one metre wide where I could walk. People would say: ‘Can I come have a look?’ but… there was no space,” he laughs. Luca set up the business to sell his bread wholesale and at farmers’ markets twice a month. “And then slowly, slowly I added on to that,” he says. “Eventually, I stopped working for Jack when I picked up a big customer, Provenance Kitchen – that was perfect timing. I had a steady income when I was delivering to them, and I added on various smaller customers in Ely – just slow, steady, at the right pace.” This calm and careful growth meant Luca was able to take opportunities when they presented themselves: a
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