Behind the counter, the flour-dusted proprietor of the Bluegrass Baking Company, Jim Betts, chats with customers while deftly filling and shaping the next day’s bacon-cheddar croissants. His wife, Francine, and son Andrew help guests choose sturdy hearth loaves from a wooden display case. (“Sliced or not sliced? Plastic bag or paper sack?”) One of the bakery’s walls is papered with bread wrappers from bakeries around the world—an apt setting for the cocktail of languages, accents and cross-cultural conversations that find their home here. Tucked away in an unassuming storefront off Clays Mill Road in Lexington, the Bluegrass Baking Company doesn’t just sell world-class bread and pastries—it brings the world together.
Betts doesn’t keep an official tally of global representation, but he’s counted as many as 13 nationalities in the bakery on a given morning. What’s the draw? For the customers I spoke to, the answer is two-fold: outstanding bread and vibrant community.
Paul Tillier, a longtime patron who grew up in Paris, France, said the bakery’s offerings are on par with the best of his home country’s venerable bread culture.
“Each time I go back to France—and it’s about every two or three years—I’m disappointed with a lot of the baguettes I get,” Tillier said. “But Jim, he’s got it down. The croissants are perfect. The baguette is perfect.”
The bakery’s international atmosphere is another draw for Tillier, who works as an interpreter for French and Spanish. He enjoys practicing his languages on Saturday mornings at the bakery, as he overhears snatches of conversation in many languages.
“I order and sit down and try to pick up the different languages,” Tillier said. “It’s wonderful. People feel very comfortable there. It’s a very open setting. You see the bread being made. You’re either talking to fellow customers, or you’re talking to Jim and his team.”
The Bluegrass Baking Company doesn’t advertise; customers find out about the bakery by word of mouth. And word does get around.
“People are often either coming through and have heard people talking about the bakery, or they’ve been abroad and are coming back and want to keep in touch with the good bread that they experienced abroad,” Tillier said. “The common denominator is bread—good-quality, artisan bread. If you’re coming from France, the first question is always, ‘Where can I find decent bread?’ And the answer inevitably is the Bluegrass Baking Company.”
The combination of small-business atmosphere, global culture and outstanding product makes the bakery part of Tillier’s weekly routine. He usually goes to the bakery two or three times each week to stock up on bread, catch up on conversations or simply observe.
“I used to spend a lot of time sitting outside cafés, watching the world go by,” Tillier said. “There [at the Bluegrass Baking Company], you can sit and actually watch the world come inside the bakery.”
Gorana Sekulic, another longtime patron of the Bluegrass Baking Company, came to the United States from the former Yugoslavia with her husband in 1993. A physician by training, Sekulic practiced for 20 years before coming to the U.S. After discovering the bakery’s products for sale at a local Liquor Barn, she became a regular customer. It was one of the few places, she said, that she could buy bread like she remembered from back home.
“It is the most important part of the diet,” Sekulic said. “We eat bread with everything. If you have nothing but bread, you are OK.”
Bread isn’t the only reason Sekulic has been a faithful customer at the bakery. She also loves the atmosphere. “You see people working all the time who love their job and who love each other,” she said.
Francesc Marti, a University of Kentucky researcher in immunology, is drawn by the traditional, handmade quality of the bakery’s products.
“I love the bread—what else?” he said. “Just look and have a taste. It’s amazing. I am coming from a small village in Spain, and over there, the bread was made by hand, not by machines or anything. So the closest that you have for taste, it is here.”
Colin Fisher, another UK scientist who grew up in Zimbabwe and also lived in England, Poland and Hungary, doesn’t really socialize at the bakery (“Not I—my English heritage is not quite the same as the continental European heritage, I suppose,” he said). He does, however, appreciate the quality of the goods and the atmosphere, which he likens to a village bakery that you might find in France or Germany.
“They bake goods we haven’t seen anywhere else,” Fisher said. “I don’t know where else you might get the same quality they’ve got there. And secondly, it’s a very personable, very friendly environment. We’ve been going there almost once a week for years and years.”
Running a bakery, let alone a hub for cross-cultural interaction, wasn’t part of Jim Betts’ plan when he was majoring in anthropology at Oberlin College in Ohio. However, in the midst of what he calls the “late ’70s reverberations of hippieism,” he began eating and working in a food co-op. He had two jobs: dishwasher and baker. It was baking, understandably, that stuck.
“I fell in love with baking,” Betts said. “I would do it late at night, baking for the next day. I liked it so much that I would bake two to three loaves a day, and I lived with six other 20-year-olds who could go through that with no problem.”
After graduation, Betts looked for a job in baking, which he recognized as a “much more employable” field than anthropology. After a first job at Le Matin bakery in Lexington and seven years of honing his craft in San Francisco pastry shops, Betts and his fiancée (now wife) opened their business in Lexington. Today, their sons, Jimmy and Andrew, also work at the bakery.
Betts said that one of the secrets to the Bluegrass Baking Company’s bread is Andy Brown, the night baker. Brown started working at the bakery 18 years ago. He began as a driver but expressed an interest in baking. Betts taught Brown everything he could about baking, and Brown “took it and ran,” according to Betts.
“He works overnight in his mad-man laboratory, and he’s terrific,” Betts said. “He’s greatly self-taught. Without a doubt, he’s the best bread maker I know, and the best in this state, if not many others.”
Betts said his products appeal to a wide clientele, not because they mimic a certain type of bread or a specific flavor profile, but because they are recognizably authentic. Customers from Ukraine, Poland, Germany and Russia love the Bohemian Beer Bread, for instance, often comparing it to the bread they remember from home—never mind the fact that Betts came up with the recipe himself.
“It’s the genuineness of the product,” he said. “The style of baking we do, right now, is in vogue and hipster, but it’s also what we’ve been doing for hundreds and hundreds of years—something that we as a culture lost when we fell in love with Wonder Bread. We’re just returning various cultures to their roots.”
Both by luck and by design, the bakery is a magnet for interesting people. Various bakery employees have gone on to find success in other creative fields like photography (Sarah Jane Webb), poetry (Eric Sutherland) and pottery (Link Henderson, owner of Kentucky Mudworks).
“Anyone in the food business will tell you it draws countercultural people,” Betts said. “Why this bakery in particular, I don’t know, except that I tend to hire people I think are cool as opposed to people who are good workers or know what they’re doing. We hire people we want to spend time with—people who are interesting, creative and energetic—and we train them for the position we need them to be in.”
Customers come to the bakery for its artisanal offerings, but they often stay for conversation, making new—and sometimes international—friendships along the way.
“Three or four weeks ago, there was an older gentleman sitting alone, looking forlorn, and another customer named Bruce decided to go over and talk to him,” Betts said. “So Bruce, being an ex-UK professor, and Abraham, a car merchant and repair guy from Libya, sit and spend a half-hour getting to know each other and had a wonderful time, brought together by appreciation of the food and the culture that we have there in the bakery. That’s the kind of thing that happens, and it happens all the time.”
The significance of bread as an idea, as more than just food, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. In many European and Arab cultures, for instance, partaking of bread and salt is a formal recognition of welcome and friendship. In the Passover meal and in Sunday Eucharist, bread takes on deeply religious significance. For Betts, though, there’s no need to overthink the power of bread.
“I’d like to say that I have some overarching plan, but I don’t,” Betts said. “I like making bread. It’s one of these things that is just pleasurable in many ways—the warmth of the oven, the smell rolling onto your nose. All these cultural references are there for a reason. I’m part of a very, very long history of people meeting around ‘a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou.’ There’s something special about it. I am as seduced by the pleasures of bread as the next person.”
At the time of this writing, the Bluegrass Baking Company, like most Kentucky businesses, is closed to the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Betts and his team are offering curbside pickup, but it’s not the same. He misses interacting with customers, seeing familiar faces, and guiding shoppers to the product that best suits their needs.
“When customers open the door and walk in, they’re part of the family, and we greet them that way, treat them that way, get them what they want,” Betts said. “Those things are gone right now, so whatever it is that a bakery provides, we have enjoyed that for a very long time and hopefully will be able to get back to it.”