Antonio Saraceni remembers when the suburban bakery was king. In the 60s, the Vastese managing director tells me, the bakery was one of the 200-odd family bakeries that supplied Perth with its daily bread. The famous Roman Bakery was - literally - around the corner while Golden Bakery and Wanneroo Bakery were some of the neighbourhood’s other proponents of flour power. On the morning of Christmas Eve, the bakery established in 1958 by Antonio’s father Giuseppe became the latest - and some might say the last - of Perth’s traditional Italian bakeries to shut its doors.
When news of Vastese’s closure became public, there were those who took the news hard. For many, Vastese was more than just a bakery. It was a place people could turn to for donations for a junior footy club fundraiser. It was a place where local caterers would go to use the bakery’s roomy ovens to prepare large orders. It was a place made all the warmer for the presence of Giuseppe “Jo” Coppola, a long-time Saraceni family friend who slipped free rolls to the kids and traded gossip with the adults. Vastese and the Saraceni family were good corporate citizens before the phrase was coined, albeit a good corporate citizen that also produced - among other things - the legendary Vastese “banana roll”, a tanned, crusty, gum-busting model roll of a thing.
Since word of the bakery’s demise got out, Vastese has been busy. Talking after his final shift, baker Eddie Pinker says the team baked the same volume of bread in its last three weeks as what they normally did in six months. Perth social media channels, meanwhile, have been filled with a record number of Vastese-related posts including a Facebook page rallying support to save the bakery. It all points to an operation that’s both valued and viable: is now really the right time to quit? According to Antonio, the cumulation of different factors convinced him and his brother and fellow director Luigi that it was time to cash in their chips. The scourge of bureaucracy. Staff retirement. The witch hunt against gluten: all valid reasons to chuck in the towel, but more than anything, the family just needed a holiday.
“75 per cent of the reason we’re closing is because we want a rest,” says Antonio.
As much as I’ll miss the bread, I can’t blame management for calling it a day. Just as kitchens are struggling to find chefs, it’s a similar situation in the baking world, not least because bakeries observe even more unsocial hours than restaurants (Vastese’s bakers, for instance, work six nights a week from early evening till 4am). The physical, repetitive nature of the work doesn’t exactly endear the trade to job-seekers, either.
At Vastese, it’s all about the dough, a process that begins with water, yeast and 15 25-kilo bags of aged strong flour. After being machine-mixed in a metal bowl roughly the size of a small hot tub, the mixture is left to rise for four hours where it triples in volume. This glossy mass is then cleaved into doona-sized armfuls and fed through a series of machines that cut the dough into the required shape and weight for the bread being baked. After being shaped by hand and rested one final time, each loaf is baked in one of Vastese’s two gas-fuelled ovens before being allowed to cool and either sold on-site or delivered somewhere in the metro area. An average night saw bakers go through a tonne of flour: during the bakery’s hey-day, the nightly flour quota was double that.
In Vastese’s early days, the bakery produced just two breads: a franzone (Italian loaf) and a long roll, the precursor to the banana roll. Thanks to advances in bread-making machinery, the bakery was producing over 60 lines at the time of closure, although this figure includes fewer traditional Italian breads than previous years. The most important line, however, was the banana roll with Vastese making between 5000 and 6000 rolls each shift. Although other bakeries offered the Saracenis considerable sums of money for the recipe, Antonio maintains that it’s impossible to replicate the roll’s taste. Part of this is due to the “terroir” of the bakery itself (everything from ambient yeasts to the taste of the water affects a bread’s flavour), although Antonio believes the bakers themselves are the most critical factor of the baking process.
“There’s no recipe,” insists Antonio during a conversation in early December.
“It’s about the tradesmen knowing what to do with that kind of dough. It’s flour. It’s water. It’s yeast. It’s mixing. You’ve got to know the temperature, how long to mix the dough, when to take it out. It took us nearly three years to perfect our roll and that was 35 years ago.”
Fast forward to the morning of Christmas Eve. It’s just past six and light in North Perth, although the weather feels unusually cool for this late in December. As I join employees, family members and long-time customers in marking the occasion with a sausage sizzle breakfast, it’s hard not to play a little “what if?”. What if consumers weren’t as infatuated with the emperor’s newest garments and happy to support long-standing local businesses? What if bread wasn’t being unfairly demonised? And what if the local council was a little more sympathetic to the plight and needs of the small business owner? From an outsider’s point of view, it's hard to see where councillors could have taken exception to initiatives like the family’s attempts to add cafe facilities to the bakery in 2011, nor why decision-makers eschewed common sense for archaic by-laws. These are among the topics I discuss at length with Luigi’s son, Joe, another Saraceni with strong ties to the family trade. While he isn't about to lay the blame for the bakery’s closure at the local council’s feel, he believes that red tape is strangling both business owners and the rich history of Perth’s inner city.
“This has been a really good example of how not to do things,” says Joe.
“The City of Vincent is running the area like it’s an outer suburb. You have to work with people to try to meet halfway on things. That’s how you keep the fabric of an old area - not by trying to change everything to the way it should be now.”
I take my last bundle of Vastese bread and head home. North Perth won't be quite the same anymore.
