On love, loss and opening Quince Bakery

A conversation with Anna Higham

It’s sadly not a bank-holiday weekend this week but it is the first of our May Substack pieces, which I’m so excited to finally share with you. For those that have followed me for a while, it’s no secret that I adore Anna’s rice pudding recipe and that my recent ice-cream maker purchase was mainly driven by the many, beautiful ice-cream recipes in her book that I was longing to make. It was such a privilege to interview Anna and to hear her story, particularly as she moves into the next chapter of her life with the opening of Quince Bakery. I hope you love reading this piece as much as I loved chatting to Anna.

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Anna Higham is an award-winning pastry chef and bestselling author of The Last Bite, which celebrates her favourite ingredients season-by-season and offers a new approach to making desserts throughout the year. It’s a book that really embraces the beauty of each season and the joy that comes from both making and eating desserts. At the time of writing this, Anna is in the throes of opening Quince Bakery with her friend and businesses parter, Paris Barghchi, after a hugely successful crowd-funding campaign. She told me how excited they are to open their first neighbourhood bakery, to get back into a routine and to get to know their new customers. The latter, is something Anna loved about her first jobs in Glasgow, recalling ‘the family who came in every week and bought 400g of Bernese chèvre cheese’ and ‘a man who came in every Saturday morning and bought 14 rashers of bacon cut at number 4’. She enthused, ‘I can’t wait to be rooted into the neighbourhood in that way, to get to know the people buying the bread and be a part of people’s lives because of the nice things I’m making.’

Anna Higham, Credit: Miles Hardwick

From architecture to the kitchen

I’m always curious to know about people’s paths into hospitality. From those I’ve interviewed over the past 18 months, there never seems to be one linear path; for some it’s a calling, passion or a deep-rooted curiosity that drives them into the industry, others seem to stumble into it, slowly falling in love with the processes, the flow of a service and kitchen friendships. And then for others, it’s something that’s much more considered - they are looking to change their career or educational path and are drawn to the hospitality sector. It always feels like a natural place to start in a conversation and so I began by asking Anna what her first steps were after school. She told me how she is the youngest of four children who had all gone to university. She was academic at school and so it was always on the cards that she would follow in her sibling’s footsteps and do an undergraduate degree. She told me, ‘At school I was good at art and I was good at maths so architecture seemed the obvious choice’ and so when she was accepted into Glasgow School of Art to study architecture, she jumped at the opportunity.  

Towards the end of her second year, Anna got an inner ear infection, which forced her to take a year away from her studies. During that year she worked full time in Ziques, a deli and bakery in Glasgow and loved it. She recounted, ‘I was front of house but then I asked to be trained on bread and then on the cakes and sweet things.’ She continued, ‘I gradually kept asking for more and more shifts in the kitchen and really realised that I was good at it and it felt, very natural, which I’d never felt while I was studying architecture.’ Anna described having a ‘proper epiphany’ moment at her classmate’s graduation ceremony when she realised she could understand their final work but had no desire to actually pursue that herself. 

Knowing that architecture wasn’t the right route for her, Anna enrolled In Glasgow Metropolitan College and embarked on a HNC (Higher National Certificate) course related to the hospitality field. On completing the course, her next stage was to apply for a her first kitchen job, which at the time felt ‘hugely intimidating’ to her, having little idea how to enter this industry with no commercial experience. Her approach was to write to as many people as she could think of in the UK who might be looking for a commis chef. It so happened that while she was studying for her HNC, her college had done a charity dinner with Gordon Ramsay and so she went onto their website and saw there was an opening in London. Anna applied and the Gordon Ramsay group called her back 20 minutes after she’d submitted her application. Anna told me, ‘It was very quick, especially when I’d not really heard back from anybody else.’

She reflected, ‘Across my career, I’ve had a lot of no’s but the one yes I’ve had has been the one yes I needed to have. Later, when I wanted to move to New York I reached out to loads of people, one restaurant (Gramercy Tavern) got back to me and they said yes and that was the only one I needed. When I was writing a book, I only had one agent come back to me and say yes and one publisher who wanted to pick up the book but that was the publisher I wanted. There have been a lot of no’s, I’ve just made the best of the opportunities that have come to me.’ 

On moving to London, New York and then back again

When I made the move from just outside London to Edinburgh, I was 23 years old. The thought of moving to a different country, away from my friends and parents was a really scary prospect and was a decision I really grappled with. Anna made a similar move only in reverse, from Glasgow to London and so I was keen to know how she found that transition. She told me, ‘I’d just turned 24 when I moved down to London. I moved down with my friend Alex and I think that definitely made it easier, I had someone who knew me and my context.’ Back home, Anna was usually known as the youngest Higham or as one of her sibling’s sister. She told me that moving to London was very freeing in that sense, it was the first time she got to just be herself. Luck also played a part in her move, Anna reflected, ‘The first restaurant I started at was called Bread Street Kitchen and it was a brand new restaurant. I think because of that a lot of people had moved to London to go and work there and so everyone was very keen to make friends with each other.’ She told me that’s not necessarily always the case in kitchens - it was something she struggled with when she moved from Bread Street Kitchen to Petrus. Anna recalled, ‘Everyone was working such long hours, that no one had a life outside of work’, making it very difficult to establish friendships and find energy to socialise.