Seemingly overnight in the mid-aughts, a heady whiff of freshly baked sourdough blanketed London. All of a sudden, you couldn’t swing a tote bag without encountering a red-awninged Gail’s, advertising Chelsea buns, sausage rolls, and house-blended coffee.
Since opening its doors on north London’s Hampstead High Street, in 2005, Gail’s has set up 151 upmarket bakeries across the U.K., with another 35 in development. On a good day, Gail’s can sell about a thousand fermented San Francisco sourdough loaves—the hero carbohydrate among more than 10 varieties, including potato and rosemary, rye, and seeded—in any one of its shops. It is the go-to spot for business meetings and yummy-mummy dates, a bit like what Le Pain Quotidien is to New York, but nicer. And when Zendaya and Tom Holland bought a home in Kingston upon Thames last year, Vogue took guesses at their Gail’s order (“a scone for her, one of those little brownie finger things for him?”).
Founded on the principle that excellence is a state of mind and mediocrity is boring, the immediate success of Gail’s makes sense—the neighborhood chain cranked back the clock on industrialized baking practices, delivering delicious pastries and even better bread.
Yet in recent years, it has become a surprisingly divisive company, a symbol of both entrepreneurship and ingenuity, and one of corporate involvement (in 2021, private-equity giant Bain Capital invested millions for a controlling stake in Gail’s) and gentrification.
This summer, the British newspaper The Telegraph ran the story “How Gail’s Became What Its Founders Claimed to Hate Most,” citing a popularly held theory that “wherever there was a branch of the upmarket bakery, there would be well-off voters with Bugaboo prams who were in love with the chain’s babyccinos and reassuringly expensive sourdough and sausage rolls,” and concluding that “such is the company’s gentrifying power that no leafy London neighbourhood or affluent southern commuter town is complete without that distinctive red and white branding.”
Other papers followed suit: “Does It Have a Gail’s?: How a Bakery Became Middle-Class England’s Most Powerful Political Bellwether,” from The Guardian, and “The Times [of London’s] view on Gail’s expansion: Bun Fight.”
Then came the October 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza, which unleashed a wave of anti-Semitism against the company, with pro-Palestine users on TikTok and X calling for customers to boycott the “Israeli-owned” Gail’s.
Most recently, on November 25, the Gail’s holding company announced it had hired Goldman Sachs to oversee its sale.
All of this, and the company’s original founder, the woman whose name blares in a sans serif font above every door, is a complete enigma. For one thing, people don’t know that she can’t bake.
Flour Child
Born Yael Mer in Belsize Park, London, to an English father and an Israeli mother, Mer, now Mejia through marriage, switched to the anglicized “Gail” after a litany of mispronunciations of her Hebrew name.
The family moved to Tel Aviv when Mejia was six months old. By the age of 12, she was neglecting school, choosing instead to wander through Tel Aviv or stay home and read. The next year, she was shipped off to a boarding school near Haifa.
The Pardes Hanna Agricultural High School, no longer operating today, was founded in 1935 by the Rothschild family on one of the largest plots of land in Israel. The agricultural heritage meant the acres upon acres of green grounds included a chicken coop, a dairy farm, a horse stable, and orchards lined with mature citrus and avocado trees. It was there, through courses in crop rotation and while learning how to calibrate nitrogen levels in soil, that Mejia came to understand produce and food production.
This, combined with her upbringing—“everybody in my family can cook and loves good food,” she says from her home in Alvaiázere, Portugal—is essential to who Mejia has become.
In 1978, after serving the mandatory two years in the Israeli Defence Forces—Intelligence Corps—Mejia moved to London to study hotel management at Westminster College. This was followed by a four-year stint at the Garrick, a historic private members’ club, where she worked both the back and front of house. (“I did everything. And I loved it!”)
Mejia’s next business was in wholesale distribution of top-quality bread, something that was entirely lacking in the city. In time, Mejia cultivated a reliable list of artisan shops and bakers, from whom she sourced focaccia, brioche, rye, soda bread, and other varieties for clients such as Gordon Ramsay and the Ritz Hotel.
“I was very good at it, and I was happy doing it,” Mejia says. “There was a huge sense of achievement, starting something from scratch that didn’t exist before.”
“We were shifting millions of loaves a year. It was insane,” remembers Mejia, who began her days at two A.M., collecting bread in a beat-up transit van and delivering it to clients across the city. “I didn’t leave London for the first two years,” she says. “I didn’t dare because I was there every morning … with the drivers.”
She lived that way for more than a decade—and changed the way London ate.
Spicing Things Up
Beyond being an excellent cook, Mejia has an unusual gift. “I taste things in my head all day long,” she says. “When I look at a recipe, I know what this thing is going to taste like off paper. I can’t explain it. But that’s literally how I ran my business.”
Despite this, Mejia can’t actually bake or make bread. In baking, the ratio of eggs to flour to fat is a science. There’s no space for creativity or experimentation. When cooking, Mejia avoids recipes altogether, stating proudly that she’s “never made the same dish twice.”
Yet while she doesn’t make bread, she understands it intrinsically, as well as the reasons why so many restaurants and cafés don’t. “The inherent issue with bread is that good bread is time, and time is money,” she says. “You want to save your money? Save on time. Out goes good bread. It’s actually so simple.”
In many ways, this is the kind of minimalist, back-to-basics thinking that informed Mejia’s first brick-and-mortar venture, Baker & Spice. In 1995, a shop on Walton Street, tucked behind Harrods, became available. Not only was the location ideal, but the site had a fully operating kitchen and a pair of large-mouthed antique brick ovens in the basement. And so, Mejia “fought for it.”
The shop floor wasn’t much bigger than a dining-room table. Amid tottering piles of brightly colored meringues, tufts of rosemary, swinging bulbs of blackened garlic, mismatched plates teeming with bright, coiled vegetables and moist, pistachio-flecked financiers, shelves lined with exotic oils and tiny orbs of lemon preserved in glass jars, and a countertop teeming with glossy blond pastries, a quiet revolution was unfolding. The food was organic, locally sourced, and made fresh daily, before there was even a vernacular for these ideas.
Within a year, every Saturday, there were lines outside Baker & Spice from seven A.M. until closing. Supermarkets were sending employees in with clipboards to make notes and eye the produce. “One of our breads appeared in Sainsbury’s,” says Mejia. “It was shameless.”
“The inherent issue with bread is that good bread is time, and time is money. You want to save your money? Save on time. Out goes good bread.”
At its height, in the run-up to Christmas, she says, the shop made more money per square centimeter than Marks & Spencer. And customers lapped it up, even if they didn’t always understand it. When it comes to food, “most people are clueless,” says Mejia. “They don’t understand agriculture. They don’t understand seasons. They don’t understand where their shit is coming from.”
“For six weeks of the year,” she says, “we had the most amazing wild grilled salmon. It costs a fortune to buy. People couldn’t get enough of it, and then it disappeared until the next year.” The reason? Mejia refused to serve salmon unless it was wild. And, in the U.K., the season of wild is six weeks. “That’s it,” she says.
The same rule applied to all the produce at Baker & Spice. “People think they’re entitled to have anything they want at whatever time of the year, just because on a whim they fancy having a strawberry,” Mejia says. “Not in my shop.”
Baker & Spice quickly became a London institution. Ringo Starr lived opposite the back door. “He would come through the kitchen, into the shop, get what he wanted, and go back out,” Mejia says. Likewise, when Julia Roberts was filming Notting Hill, she stayed just around the corner. “She used to walk into the shop every morning and stand there amongst all the other people. And nobody recognized her because she had a baseball cap on and no makeup. She would come every morning for a blueberry muffin and a coffee to go.”
If the description of Baker & Spice sounds familiar, it’s because today’s Ottolenghi shops are basically its carbon copy. Yotam Ottolenghi, the Israeli-British chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author who today presides over a food empire in London, started off as Baker & Spice’s pastry chef. (The Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi, now a partner at Ottolenghi’s deli chain and an author of several cookbooks, ran the kitchen.)
It was working at Baker & Spice “that made Ottolenghi,” according to a lengthy 2012 New Yorker profile of Ottolenghi, titled “The Philosopher Chef.” Yet Mejia isn’t mentioned once.
When asked if she liked working with Ottolenghi, Mejia replies “no” without hesitation. “He didn’t leave a mark,” she says. “He didn’t bring us some sort of sensation, or cake recipe, or a new concept, or new product. Nothing of the kind.”
Ottolenghi did, however, strip Mejia’s kitchen of her entire team. “You work for me for seven years,” she says. “You have a fantastic time doing it. You have complete freedom to create whatever you damn well like,” she says of the betrayal. (Ottolenghi and his team did not respond to requests for comment.)
“People think they’re entitled to have anything they want at whatever time of the year, just because on a whim they fancy having a strawberry. Not in my shop.”
Baker & Spice was sold to Patisserie Holdings in 2009 and then off-loaded to the Department of Coffee and Social Affairs in 2019. Today, all that remains of it is an old Tripadvisor page and a few fleeting references online.
Gail’s, meanwhile, grew from one of Mejia’s wholesale businesses, the Bread Factory. The concept—a shop that was “multipliable to infinity without compromising on quality”—was dreamed up when Mejia met Ran Avidan, a fellow Israeli living in London, who worked at McKinsey. Through Avidan, she met Tom Molnar, another McKinsey consultant, who remains the C.E.O. of Gail’s to this day. (Mejia and Avidan exited the business in 2011, following a sale to a British investment fund.)
Despite its rapid expansion, Gail’s still sources all of its produce and ingredients from British-based suppliers—the milk comes from a small family estate in Lancaster, and its eggs are bought from Stonegate, an organic farm in Wiltshire. About 95 percent of the chain’s flour is milled in the U.K., from grains also grown locally.
Like everything Mejia has done, Gail’s is a hybrid—of cultures, tastes, and traditions. On offer is a marvelous mix of hot and cold, sweet and savory. “It’s not that everything is perfect there,” she says—the coffee, for example, “is shit,” and Mejia avoids it. “But when you think about what you’re talking about,” she continues, “it’s insanely good. And it’s insanely successful. And it’s insanely huge and growing. You can’t argue with that.”
As for the controversy that Gail’s evokes? “Everybody is entitled to their opinions and analysis about what Gail’s brings,” Mejia says. “But when the answer to that is a seriously good product that is made well and tries to maintain best practices … and ultimately, what you eat is delicious, that’s what it’s about,” she continues. “It’s a miracle that a business of this magnitude still wants to not cut corners.”
She adds: “This business of what happens to a neighborhood if Gail’s opens? It is an insane argument.... And I find it uniquely distasteful.” And she calls the anti-Semitism the chain has experienced in the last year—the morning we spoke, a Gail’s in central London had been graffitied—“mental.”
“My parting shot as we signed the papers was, remember that my name is on the door,” Mejia says. “And Molnar still remembers it. And he’s doing his best not to fuck it up.”
Now retired and living with her third husband, Vicente Mejia, a former Baker & Spice employee, in a house—and nearly 400,000 square feet of gardens—they built together from the ground up, Mejia says her days are spent spritzing eggplants and tending tomato patches in dirt-stained boots and a large-brimmed hat.
But she is still Gail. “I’ve never taken the glory,” she says. “But … I did all that. And I can’t make a fucking loaf of bread.”
Bridget Arsenault is a Writer at Large at Air Mail
