Bangkok has no shortage of cafés, with new locations popping up faster than you can blink. Looking to meet your friends for a couple of hours? Grab a coffee and a bagel at a café. Need somewhere to settle in with your laptop and a heap of unanswered emails in your inbox? That new café on your street with the charging outlets has a chair with your name written on it.
Whether you ascribe to it or not, the café has become a modern amphitheatre. It is a place where people gather, where they share stories, where they build lives.
What about the core of the café? Some would argue that it’s the coffee. If you’re more of a fan of sandwiches, and bagels, you’d argue the latter.
Now, Bangkok is no New York with its delis and bagel shops, and finding a sesame bagel with lox and cream cheese may be difficult but the city has come a long way from sliced white bread and 7-Eleven toasties.
These days, Bangkok has a flourishing community of bakers in its alleys, and part of this conversation is Holey Artisan Bakery.
Masala met with its founder, Nasirul Alam Porag, at the Holey Mothership location where we were acquainted with the sourdough starter feeding Holey and how it all began.
Every business has an origin story. What inspired you to start Holey Artisan Bakery?
When my wife and I moved from New York to Bangladesh in 2005, we didn’t realise how difficult it would be to find bread, let alone sourdough bread.
We were trying to figure out how to actually make our own proper sourdough but there were several things we didn’t understand then. The humidity, the condition of the air, and the subsequent effect these factors have on your wheat, your bread, these were the things we had never thought of and as a result, didn’t understand until we started this journey.
Tell us about the early days in Dhaka when the journey began.
We had a consultant fly in from the UK for three days, an English-French baker. We invited him because we knew there was knowledge that we didn’t have that we could acquire and he told us one thing: “To make the best bread, you will need the best oven.”
Essentially, even if you set out to make the best sourdough bread possible, your bread will never be better than the oven you’re baking it in.
We were in a conundrum. The bread had been something I just wanted for home and now, we were told that the best oven would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Investing in something like that automatically meant you would need to also invest in a business. After all, how much bread can two people actually eat you know? [Laughs.]
Would you mind walking us through a typical day in your life?
I wake up very early, usually around 5 AM or earlier. On Fridays, I like to make a round of all the shops.
I start at 6:30 AM at the Soi 31 location. In a half hour, I’ll be at the Ruamrudee location, and then I will go to Suan Phlu where my office is, then come to Holey Mothership in Pridi Banomyong.
I don’t bake here as much anymore. The baking team is well-trained and Chandler looks after the operations.
I also just opened a wine bar on Sukhumvit Soi 49 with some friends. Tõst 49 is a wine and broth bar in a fun space that utilises both indoor and outdoor spaces.
I also travel a lot.
Starting a bakery is one thing, building a brand is another. What do you think has been the key to Holey Artisan Bakery’s longevity as you celebrate ten years?
Mostly… A lot of luck. Then, it’s just continuous attention to quality and consistently executing excellence on a daily basis.
To me, that’s the key. The original idea for Holey was always to make great quality bread for the home, for friends, and for families.
From that idea, we slowly built a community. That in itself is a very joyful thing to see and has become a driving force for the brand.
With a bakery that has been around for so long, there are probably customers who are regulars. Do you have any stories of loyal customers?
We have about 75 to 85 percent repeat customers in all our Holey locations. People who come, they come all the time.
I have seen people who met at Holey, then got married, and had kids. And they were all here at our 10-year anniversary party.
The best thing about this sort of bakery where production happens simultaneously where the bakery is, I find that people from grandparents to grandkids, have similar experiences.
A child will remember for many years the times they went with their parents, or grandparents, to the bakery on a Sunday. At the end of the day, these are the memories that stay.
When customers walk through the doors, what do you hope they experience beyond the bread?
For me, it’s always about the space for creating memories. Memories can become more dense, more layered in a place where there is better food, better service, better music, and better visuals.
The whole point is that someone is coming here in their own time with their loved ones, their friends, and their family.
The croissant, the bread, the food, it all goes away. The brand goes away but as an individual, your memories remain.
At Holey Artisan Bakery, all of our five locations look very different but they all feel like Holey. It feels like a community.
As café and restaurant owners, I find it to be a very precious thing we do—to create a memory they can reminisce ten years down the road.
Bangkok was not the first Holey location. You began operations in Dhaka which ran until 2016. There was an incident at the Holey location there. In the years since, how did you navigate the journey of rebuilding?
I wasn’t in Bangladesh at the time of the incident. We were two weeks into our first location in Sukhumvit Soi 31 but we felt the tremors of the situation here as well.
It was quite a shock, of course. It was a place we all loved. It was always so busy and meant so much to so many people.
For me, the only way you can do anything is to carry on and continue doing what you must.
If you could be remembered for one quality rather than one achievement, what would it be?
I would say, my drive for excellence. Whether it is small or large, every action should have excellence, wisdom, and grace.