PROFILE
Born in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1974, he decided to become a baker at the age of 22 and started working at Donk, a prestigious French bakery. In November 2002, he opened "Katane Bakery" in a residential area of Yoyogi Uehara, and in 2007, he started a café in the basement of the bakery. In recent years, he has been passionate about offering natural wines.
From guitarist to baker
I spent my mid-teens playing punk rock, quitting high school halfway through and immersing myself in music. My charge was guitar. But when I was 22, I got married and decided to try a different career. Then my wife and her friend said to me, "Daisuke, you are good at getting up early, so you should become a baker. Maybe my memory is wrong, but that was the extent of my motivation to become a baker.
I got a job at "Donk" and was taught the basics of baking. I became a baker without thinking that deeply, but since I decided to do it, I devoted myself to it with sincerity.
As a side note, every summer my family and I spend about a month in France, driving around and visiting different regions. I sometimes meet bakers, and when I tell them that I also make bread, they ask me "Pain français? They are very happy when I tell them that my bakery makes baguettes and other French breads. I am not sure if they mean "pain japonais" (Japanese bread) or "bean buns" or what they are referring to, but I am not sure of the definition. I don't think they themselves think that deeply about it (laughs).
Goal is to become independent at age 28, ideal property found in Nishihara.
From the time I started working at Donk, I had decided that I would start my own business at the age of 28. What I wanted to do was to sell "everyday bread that I would be happy to have there every day. From the beginning, I thought that Yoyogi Uehara would be a good location, as I was used to living there.
My encounter with the property was by chance. I was walking around the neighborhood and found a vacant lot. It was about a 10-minute walk from both Yoyogi Uehara and Hatagaya stations, and right in the middle of a residential area. Nowadays, the Yoyogi Uehara and Nishihara area is a popular area with a high concentration of restaurants, but back in 2002, there were almost no stores of any kind on this street. What is there are houses of people who have lived there for decades and condominiums for families. I wanted to sell bread that was close to the community and close to the dining table, so that was the ideal place for me.
When we first opened Katane Bakery, we weren't that well known in the neighborhood. For the first few years, it was just a humble store where neighbors would stop by on their way to do some shopping. We had glass walls so that the workshop and sales floor could be seen from the outside, but the building itself had plain white walls with no big signage, and the area above the bakery was the actual house where my family lived, so I think it was hard to recognize us as a bakery. But we did it on a dare. We wanted to blend in with people's lives, and this was reflected in the design of the bakery.
Sell safe and secure food at a decent price
Since the opening of the store, our motto has been to sell bread using ingredients as close to nature as possible and at a fair price that can be afforded on a daily basis. Today, we use 100% domestic wheat and other ingredients are as organic as possible. All fillings (what goes inside) are homemade. But we don't go out of our way to put that on our price cards, and we don't promote it to our customers. This is because we believe that it is natural for people to eat safe and secure food made from ingredients that are close to nature.
Prices are also in the 100-200 yen range for most items, including croissants, Queenie Amans, scones, and English muffins. We have four types of bread, for example, our best-selling mountain-shaped bread, Pain Anglais, is 280 yen per loaf. Just as organic foods are generally a bit pricier, our breads could be a bit more expensive considering the ingredients. But we try not to raise the price as much as possible. How do we manage our business? We just try our best to make a lot of bread and sell a lot. It's a thin profit margin business.
I want people to feel free to buy bread at our bakery just as they do at convenience stores and supermarkets, where they can buy bread at reasonable prices. The recent bread boom has led to an increase in fashionable, delicious, and slightly rich breads in the world, which I call "bread for special occasions. In contrast, what I make is "everyday bread.
It is important to be able to continue eating everyday food without getting tired of it. That is why our entire staff tastes our bread every day to fine-tune the taste so that people in the neighborhood will not get tired of eating it every day. Even our regular bread that we have been selling since the opening of the store is tasted regularly. The idea is that if we don't get tired of eating it every day, our customers won't either.
From a simple store in a residential area to a popular restaurant with a long line of customers
Katane Bakery first came to the attention of the general public, not just neighbors and bread lovers, when our bread and baguettes started being served at Blue Bottle Coffee in 2015. When Blue Bottle Coffee decided to expand into Japan, they blind tasted dozens of breads in Tokyo to select breads for their café, and our bread happened to be among them.
When the media started to pick up the bread as "the bread chosen by Blue Bottle," the number of customers who came from far away to buy it increased at once. It seems that the impression of our regular customers has changed a little, and they now say to me, "I've always thought your bread was delicious. Since we had been doing business quietly for so long, people in the neighborhood used to wonder, "I think the bread here tastes good, but it's cheap, so I wonder if it's good bread or not? I guess they wondered a little bit. But when the Blue Bottle selected their bread, they suddenly felt confident that their bread was delicious. ( lol )
The Corona Disaster Reaffirms the Ideal "Everyday Bakery
What I want to continue to do is to make "everyday bread. Even when the whole world needed to refrain from going out in the spring of this year due to the outbreak of the new coronavirus, we remained open from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. as usual. This is because we wanted the people who eat our bread at their tables to be able to continue their "daily lives" as much as possible.
Instead, infection prevention was thoroughly implemented from a very early stage. We drew a white line around the store to keep customers a certain distance from the bread counter and staff, and we also hung plastic covers from the ceiling to prevent droplets. Because of the small size of the store, the number of people allowed in the store at one time was limited to two, and money was always exchanged using cash trays.
Since the end of March, I have been posting on SNS, "Katane Bakery will be open for business as usual, but please do not come from far away as we are a grocery store in town. One of our regular customers asked, "How far away is 'far away'? I always buy bread from them, but it's a bit further than walking distance, so I'm worried about it," but in my mind, we were "open for people who eat our bread as a regular meal. So it was difficult to show the physical distance, but since the store was originally opened for the neighborhood, I didn't feel that the corona made any major changes other than the prevention of infection.
The city has become more and more prosperous and bustling, and society has changed, but my concept of a "community-based bakery that is close to the dining table" has not changed.
