FOOD & DR INK
Br e ad winn e r GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN, LUCA FIORIO DECIDED TO START HIS OWN MICRO BAKERY IN ELY. CHARLOTTE GRIFFITHS FINDS OUT MORE
baguettes, a wall piled high with bread of every shape and colour – and tray after tray of tempting pastries, glossed to a shine, waiting to be thrust into a paper bag, torn into hunks and enjoyed greedily even before you’ve bustled out of the shop. Luca Fiorio is the baker and brains behind this latest addition to Cambridgeshire’s food scene, but it’s not even 12 months since he was scooping at Jack’s Gelato, where Luca worked after moving to Cambridgeshire from London. “It feels like ages ago – but I only stopped working for Jack at the end of December last year,” Luca says. Prior to landing in Ely, Luca and his wife Robyn had been living in London. Robyn worked (and still does) for the NHS across Islington and Camden, while Luca was earning his keep in restaurant kitchens, where he’d been cheffing since he was 15 years old. “I didn’t want to go to school – I had no interest whatsoever in that,” Luca says of his childhood. “After many fights with my dad, I said, ‘That’s it. I just want to cook’. My dad said, ‘Fine – I’ll sort something out’ – and he found me an internship at Combal.Zero, a restaurant in a castle just outside of Turin.” Led by Italian chef Davide Scabin, Combal.Zero is still regularly listed as one of the 100 best restaurants in the world, and has a strong reputation for innovative and extremely creative eating experiences. It’s quite the place to start your career. “I did that for six months – I didn’t get paid, but my dad was happy to give me money for fuel 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, where he made a home on four wheels – then eventually 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. Throughout his career, Luca has had an obsession with bread. “People overlook it,” he says, when asked why it matters. He
ntil recently there was little to note about Saturday mornings on St Mary’s Street in Ely. Now, however, you can tell when the weekend’s begun, because of the long line of people – rain or shine – queuing outside a stylish sage green store that’s become the public face of Grain Culture: the bakery everyone’s talking about. Rough-hewn sourdough loaves big enough to feed entire families, wire baskets of toothsome
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