It’s fair to say that David Le Masurier, the owner of Cardiff’s Pettigrew Tea Rooms and Pettigrew Bakeries, has had an incredibly busy ten years by anyone’s standards. Especially for someone who jokingly describes themselves as “an inherently lazy person.”
Over the last decade he’s established his tea room, set in the Grade II listed West Lodge of Cardiff’s Bute Park, as a destination for one of the city’s best afternoon teas. He’s also built one of the city’s most well-loved craft bakeries in Victoria Park, raising the bar for Cardiff’s baked goods offering when it opened back in 2016.
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However, after 10 years of running the tea rooms, David has decided to sell it so he can focus on the exciting plans he has for his bakery.
But, it’s been a difficult decision to part with a business whose inspiration can be traced all the way back to David’s childhood in Devon.
"There are tea rooms in Devon all over the place. So a day out for me and my family would be to go somewhere and have a cream tea.”
“My mum and her best friend used to catch up and I'd get dragged along as a little boy. I remember sitting there for hours, listening to them just chatting and being really bored and trying to drink the tea to speed them up!"
From an early age it was clear that David had an affinity for hospitality and when he left school he moved to Cardiff in 2001 to study hospitality at Cardiff Met University.
“I studied something that I really wanted to do, it was kind of always obvious. When I was four I got lost in a hotel. My parents thought I was lost but I was in the restaurant folding napkins. It's pretty cringe now but I just loved it.”
When he graduated, David took a job working for the Angel Hotel in Cardiff and following a series of promotions found himself responsible for sales across the south of the UK for the hotel’s parent company.
"I could see where the next 10 years were going to go and they wanted their pound of flesh. My Blackberry was buzzing constantly on the weekend and evenings. I had this lush company car and all these things. At the time I remember feeling like I'd really made it but what they were asking from me was just so intense and we lost somebody quite close to us in our family at the time.
“Through those months, my epiphany moment was thinking 'I know I can work really hard. So if I can do this for someone else, could I get more from it by working for myself?'”
Having decided to walk away from his high-flying career, David settled on the idea of opening a tea room in Cardiff and charted his journey through a blog entitled, I Want to Bake Free.
David regularly updated his readers with his business plans including menu ideas, furniture he’d purchased and the search for an ideal venue.
As well as providing a clever marketing strategy to get people emotionally invested in his journey, it also made David accountable to himself.
“I often joke that I was always quite an inherently lazy person. However, I'm also really stubborn. So I was able to leverage my stubbornness over any laziness and part of that was making it tangible by telling the world I was going to open a tea room.”
"My plan was to open a little place somewhere like Wellfield Road, not 110 covers in Bute Park that was open seven days a week. I had five days a week in mind but it became much bigger."
Located in Bute Park’s Victorian West Lodge, a building which was originally used to accommodate Cardiff Castle’s employees, Pettigrew Tea Rooms opened its doors in March 2012. Over the last ten years it has become a Cardiff institution known for its excellent homemade cakes and afternoon teas.
"The biggest shock was that it was busy and popular. And then it was kind of relentless because it was seven days a week, managing every aspect of the business.
“That was quite an amazing journey to go on. It felt great.”
It was the success of the tea room that spurred David on to open his next business venture, Pettigrew Bakeries.
"Very early on in the tea rooms we had ambitions to bake more. I always wanted to make our own rolls or cob to serve with soup and the logistics of the West Lodge meant that was impossible.
“What we already do in that tiny building is massively beyond the realms of what most people would do in such a small space.
“That and the fact that we couldn't source any bread locally from a wholesale point of view. So all of those things were kind of whirring around in my mind, wanting to do something different.”
Opening the bakery was to prove even more of a challenge for David than the tea rooms.
“The tea rooms gave me the confidence, probably in retrospect quite a lot of overconfidence, that I could go in and smash opening a bakery.”
“It was tough opening the tea rooms, something I would never want to do again. I loved it, but it was gruelling in lots of ways as well. And the bakery was like that multiplied by six.”
Pettigrew Bakeries opened its doors on St David’s Day in 2016 on the former site of F Janes and Son , a Victoria Park hardware shop that was open for over 80 years.
It arrived just at a time when people were becoming more interested in sourdough bread and better quality baked goods.
"People are so aware now of what bread is, how things are made, what the ingredients are and what they're putting into their bodies. Previously nobody would even bat an eyelid about what the bread was, it was just like a plate that you would deliver other foods on top of.”
Pettigrew was one of the pioneers of craft baking in Cardiff, opening long before the numerous high end bakeries which can now be found across the city.
However, it was a steep learning curve for David, who wasn’t from a baking background.
"I'd underestimated how much it would cost to set up the business and also I'd decided to try and buy the property. So we were in deep, very deep. So being fully hands on and doing five night shifts a week was absolutely going to happen and it happened within three or four months for me.
“At 3am I was literally just making the bread. I still do get involved but I've now been able to train up an amazing team and we're reaping the benefits."
“Really in those first few years we just learned the hard way by doing. When I look back I'm proud but I can see how far we've accelerated from where we were."
The shortage of skilled bakers in Cardiff is still an issue even today.
"There are no bakers, there's no pipeline of bakers in Cardiff. The best we can hope for as a group of bakeries is either bringing people on through apprenticeships or just literally bringing people into the industry and training them up.
“It's really, really tough to find people so if you can't do it yourself, it's incredibly naive to think of opening a place!”
One big addition to the Pettigrew Bakeries team last year was the arrival of Michael Coggan, part of the winning Gin and Bake team from Bake Off: The Professionals 2021.
His intricate patisserie creations, including eclairs, gateaux and choux buns, have given Pettigrew’s range an extra dimension.
However, when Michael joined the team, David didn’t actually know that he had won Bake Off and he found out at the same time as everyone else.
"He joined us before the show aired, which was probably good because you talk about the pressure of expectation.”
Whilst David planned to gradually build up Pettigrew’s patisserie selection, Michael’s success accelerated the process.
“All of a sudden, he was on TV and he's won this competition and people are knocking on the door and saying 'what is your team producing?!”
"It's been amazing to see him create these absolutely stunning products and also lead a team of people. We started off with just one person working with him and I've been able to move around our whole team of bakers so he now has a team of four bakers working under him.”
Another big driver of change in David’s business was the pandemic. Whilst the tea rooms closed its doors for three months at the start of the pandemic, the bakery kicked into gear.
As well as working with other independent food businesses in Cardiff to feed NHS staff, Pettigrew Bakeries launched home deliveries and a webshop, and there were regular queues outside the Victoria Park shop.
“Everyone just felt like they wanted to be helpful and do something. And the worst thing would be just sitting at home if we didn't have to.
"At that point the bakery was supporting the tea room because the furlough scheme didn't start paying any money for months. The guys at the bakery knew they were working to support their brothers and sisters down the road at the other business.”
When the tea room finally reopened for takeaway in June 2020, David noticed an interesting change in his customer base.
“It really rediscovered a bit of a lost connection with local people who maybe hadn't been thinking of going to the tea rooms quite so frequently and had in mind that it was this place that you have to book in advance for afternoon tea.”
“We found hundreds of new loyal customers, because people were rediscovering the park on their doorstep during lockdown and that was amazing.”
Whilst the tea rooms were operating as a takeaway, David also took the opportunity for a refurbishment.
“The good thing about being shut on the inside was that it allowed us to rethink how we use the space.”
Having been completely reconfigured to increase its capacity and make the most of the views of the park, the tea room has had a dramatic new look with exposed ceiling beams and a brand new and much bigger kitchen on the former site of a gift shop.
“We were trying to achieve all the things that could make the tea rooms successful for another ten years to come.”
However, the tea room’s refurbishment has led David to take the difficult decision to sell it after ten years.
"The strange thing was it gave me a fire in the belly to want to take the tea rooms forward but at the same time I know I can't do it justice now. It's at such an incredible point for somebody else to take it forward and invest their time and energy into it.
"We all compare ourselves to each other, small food businesses in Cardiff, and I've seen some people who are able to run multiple businesses and just keep doing different things and opening new things all the time and I have no idea how they do that.
“I'm really itching to do something else and something new and the direction is through the bakery. I adore it.”
David is clearly very excited about his future plans for the bakery, including expanding the wholesale side of the business, further ramping up their patisserie offering, looking at potential additional sites, and even a brunch offering.
It sounds like David’s next 10 years are going to be just as busy as the last.
“I can see loads of possibilities, but there’s only one me.
"I've got to be realistic about how much energy I have. Have I got more or less energy than 10 years ago? I definitely have less energy.
“How am I going to feel in another 10 years? Probably close to retirement!"
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