“My parents were the head of a driving school in Nancy and received many students who were studying in the city’s business school. They liked their style and dreamed that I too would go to business school. To their great joy, I joined Audencia, in Nantes, after a preparation for HEC. My studies ended in 1997 with an internship at the Societe Generale, before working for this bank in Switzerland. I then worked for Crédit commercial de France (now HSBC), the Agricultural credit, Lehman Brothers and the Japanese investment bank Nomura, in various positions. Overall, I loved what I was doing.
In 2012, I was sent to New York by Nomura to develop securities financing operations with American clients. After two and a half years, I was repatriated to London, where I had lived between 2005 and my departure for the United States. This return was made a bit against my will… I was 40 years old and felt like I was staying in the middle of the ford.
On the work side, I was earning a very good living but no longer had any real prospects. I had never been very good at selling myself internally and told myself that I could never become a managing director. I was starting to get bored, to be tired. And then the atmosphere in finance had really changed since I started. It was a much more regulated industry and the personal liability that I incurred in these operations had become disproportionate.
Do something concrete
Friends who ran a cafe in New York told me that it was very easy to create an establishment like theirs. If you start a viable business in the United States, you get a visa. The idea caught on … I thought it would be good to open a French café. There was still very little good bread there, so I thought about buying some from a wholesaler to resell in my cafe. Finally, I wanted to do something with my hands, something concrete, and I preferred to train at the bakery to make the bread myself. At the beginning of 2014, I left Nomura to go back to New York.
Using my savings from my career in finance, I bought a three-story building in Brooklyn, a stone’s throw from my friends cafe. The idea: to open a bakery-café on the ground floor and rent the upper floors as apartments. I enrolled in a school in the city for a ten week training course in baking. A few months later, in June 2015, the establishment that I named ‘The printing house’ opened its doors.
Gus Reckel gets up at dawn to produce pastries.DR
I had the freedom to do this project when I was single and childless. Having never been a big spender with luxury tastes, it didn’t make me miserable to know that I might not have a lot of money. It was necessarily easier to tell yourself that if I screwed up, I wouldn’t take my wife or my husband and my children with me.
Wake up at 3 a.m.
I was quickly seen as the baker frenchy and it helped in terms of image. But this project was not easy, quite the contrary. My establishment is open 365 days a year. I worked non-stop the first few years and gave up my social life at that time. At the start, I only had one full-time person to help me, compared to about ten employees today.
My alarm clock rings almost daily at 3 a.m. I start work at 3:30 am and prepare breads, pastries and quiches until noon. In the afternoon, I take care of the management: you have to pay the bills, pay the salaries, manage the stocks… And since the health crisis, manage the orders. The pandemic has not had too much of an impact on us, we can no longer serve our coffees at the table, but the take-out service is working well.
Proud to manage a viable establishment
I wanted to create a well-established establishment in its neighborhood and create a strong link with the inhabitants. We communicate a lot on Instagram, explaining what is going well but also our setbacks. This place is also committed. I claim to be gay, an LGBT flag flies on the storefront and 80% of the staff is LGBTQI.
The reconverted Frenchy bakery is committed to LGBT rights.Printing
My life is here now. I kept my French nationality but I recently applied to obtain American nationality at the same time. My green card expires in eight years, its renewal is never 100% guaranteed and I want to make sure I have no problems staying. I would also like to be able to vote.
New York is a pretty exhausting, polluted and noisy city. I aspire to a calmer life in the country, perhaps elsewhere in the State. But for now, I am proud and happy to manage this establishment, and above all, to make it viable. I’m not the next one Pierre Hermé but my only ambitions are to have a ‘safe’ place for our community and to bake the best bread possible. “
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