Despite what you may have heard, Bakehouse does not hire actors to queue up for its Hong Kong-influenced, European-style breads and pastries. The lines outside its bakeries are not there to generate hype; they aren’t pieces of carefully stage-managed theatre. They exist simply because Bakehouse is so popular.

 

“It’s genuinely real people who queue,” says Bakehouse founder Grégoire Michaud, laughing. “There is a queue, but it moves fairly fast. We serve one customer every 41 seconds, statistically.”

 

The queue may not be intentional, but it encapsulates the contradictions Michaud now has to manage. Bakehouse is a neighbourhood bakery that has become a tourist destination; an artisanal business now operating at formidable scale; and a European-style bakery whose most famous product is a reinterpretation of one of Hong Kong’s culinary emblems.

 

It seems fair to say Bakehouse is a phenomenon. Since opening the doors to its first retail location in 2018, in Wan Chai, it has become one of Hong Kong’s key culinary destinations — no small feat in a city defined by its food. The egg tarts in particular are so popular that K-pop idols send their assistants to pick some up, and there are reports of them being re-sold in Shenzhen.

 

Behind it all is a balance of priorities and a series of questions. How you produce tens of thousands of egg tarts a day, alongside breads and other types of pastries, while still maintaining a sense of craft? How did a European-style bakery become so emblematic of Hong Kong? And where does Bakehouse go from here?

 

A restless baker

 

The story starts in Switzerland, where a boy named Grégoire Michaud got an early start as a baker. Growing up on a farm in the alpine canton of Valais, Michaud’s parents rarely allowed him to have candy, so he learned how to make crêpes in order to indulge his sweet tooth. “Flour, eggs, sugar and milk were always around,” he recalls, not to mention fresh produce and homemade preserves — which explains why, when Michaud talks about baking today, he often talks just as readily about local ingredients and seasonality.

 

Inspired by his adventure with crêpes, Michaud became an apprentice baker at the age of 15 and spent eight years learning the craft. But he butted up against the inherently conservative values of rural Switzerland. Any innovation risked upsetting “half the village,” he says. “I was like, okay, this can’t be my life.”

 

He briefly considered a career in the police or military. But then came inspiration from an unexpected source: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The sit-com’s clothing, swagger and glamorous vision of American life sparked something in Michaud.

 

“I think I am someone with probably a condition of getting bored very quickly — and always wanting to do more things, new things,” he says. And so, without speaking any English, he picked up a copy of Le Petit Robert’s French-English dictionary and painstakingly wrote a series of job applications that he sent off to American hotels. The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs responded.

 

“Colorado wasn’t your Hollywood from Fresh Prince,” recalls Michaud. “It was more cowboy hats.” The hotel kitchen was understaffed and Michaud recalls it was particularly tough work. He started looking for a job elsewhere. After about a year, he received an offer from Steve Wynn’s Bellagio in Las Vegas, which unexpectedly took him to Biloxi, Mississippi, where Wynn’s company was opening a new resort.

 

Michaud measures his words when talking about the experience. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the American South,” he says. But suffice it to say, he wasn’t smitten. His itchy feet struck again. He decided, almost arbitrarily, that he wanted to see Asia, so he fired off another round of job applications. This time, he received a positive reply from the Regent Hong Kong. After a job interview and exam in Austin, Texas, he flew back to Biloxi, packed his things and set off for Hong Kong in 1999.

 

“It was another huge culture shock,” he recalls. The hotel sent a limousine to pick him up from the airport. “The next morning, I opened the curtains, saw the skyline and thought, ‘Where am I?’” He admits, laughingly, that at the time he was a bit hazy about Hong Kong’s actual location in the world. “I told my mom I was going to Japan.”

 

He didn’t like it at first. “You know, I’m a boy from the countryside, and even Colorado Springs and Biloxi — well, they’re like the country too,” he says. When he stepped out of the Regent he was shocked by Hong Kong’s frenetic energy. “I thought, why are all these people in a hurry? Rushing, rushing, rushing, fast, fast, fast.”

 

But affection for the place snuck up on him — as it does with so many people who come to Hong Kong and end up staying for decades. He remembers his first experience of a local baked good was when the Regent’s chef was introducing him to dim sum. At the end of the meal came a plate of miniature egg tarts. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is delicious. Can I have 20 more?’”

 

At the hotel, Michaud worked long hours, six days a week. “I was a hotel rat,” he says. On his one day off, he did laundry and went to Délifrance, which always had French newspapers and — most importantly — the closest thing Hong Kong had the time to affordable European-style bread. “I need bread in my life,” says Michaud.

 

Later, his Hong Kong girlfriend — now wife — introduced him more deeply to local bakeries: pineapple buns, cocktail buns, hot dog buns. At first, the sweetness confused him. But eventually, these foods became part of his own bakery nostalgia. Hong Kong didn’t just influence him through ingredients; it changed the emotional associations he attached to baked goods.

 

Breaking free

 

Michaud spent 14 years working at hotels, first at the Regent, and then at the Four Seasons, where he trained in Dublin and the Maldives before returning to Hong Kong for the hotel’s grand opening at IFC in 2005. By the early 2010s, he was living in what he described as a “corporate cocoon,” with a stable salary, insurance, laundry, travel benefits and media exposure. But he soon began to realise there was no next step for him.

 

That’s when Michaud had a chance meeting with a banker named Frédéric Koerckel. He was trying to bake at home and approached Michaud to borrow some flour, knowing they had just the right kind of high-quality flour needed to make European-style bread — not always easy to find in Hong Kong. Over numerous gin and tonics, Koerckel told Michaud about his dream of starting his own bakery in Hong Kong.

 

That’s how Bakehouse was launched, not as the retail bakery we know today, but as a wholesale business. The proposition was straightforward: would the bread Michaud had been making for a five-star hotel succeed outside that protected environment?

 

It did. Maybe even too well.

 

Four Seasons had trained him never to say no to a guest. He carried this reflex into his own business, accepting bespoke orders in tiny quantities until the bakery was producing roughly 140 separate products. The operation became, in his words, a “pressure cooker.”

 

The solution was not a culinary revelation but commercial discipline: fewer stock-keeping units, standard order quantities, clearer product bundles and the willingness to reject unreasonable requests. “The unlearning was learning to say no,” he says when asked what he had to change after having worked in hotels for so long.

 

An accidental hit

 

It’s probably unfair to describe Bakehouse’s success as an accident, because by the time the first retail operation opened in 2018, Michaud had spent years perfecting his recipes on the wholesale side of the business.

 

But the egg tart definitely wasn’t part of the original plans. It was introduced to solve the problem of leftover cuttings from the laminated sourdough that was used to make Bakehouse’s croissants. Instead of discarding them, Michaud and his bakers tried relaminating the dough and forming it into egg tart shells. The first attempt wasn’t what they had imagined. “It was a bit funny, with big bubbles,” he says. It took a few months of tweaks — altering the mould material, heat transfer, custard and baking process — to achieve the final result that so many people crave today.

 

Given its popularity, there has been some debate online and in the media over whether the Bakehouse egg tart can really represent Hong Kong. But on this point, Michaud is clear: “We never pretended to be a Hong Kong egg tart.” The custard is more similar to what you’d find in a Portuguese pastel de nata than it is in a classic Hong Kong-style egg tart. But it’s undeniable that, after eight years and millions of egg tarts sold, the Bakehouse version has entered into the Hong Kong culinary canon.

 

Michaud thinks there’s room for all kinds of different approaches. “You don’t need to be a far-right extremist of the egg tart,” he says, laughing. Just as Bakehouse plays around with local ingredients and other local pastries — one of their rotating features is a mashup of a pineapple bun and mango sago pudding — the egg tart creates something new within the context of tradition. It respects the recognisable form while changing the mechanics.

 

“What had to stay was that it was recognisable as an egg tart and not be a gimmick,” says Michaud. “I don’t think we should fix what’s not broken.”

 

Craft and commerce

 

Bakehouse now has eight locations across Hong Kong, with a ninth opening in the airport later this year and a 10th planned around the middle of 2027. But Michaud plans to cap the number of local Bakehouse outlets at 10, to preserve quality. He notes that’s only about one Bakehouse for every 750,000 Hong Kong residents.

 

“We’ve been called a bakery chain before, and that hurts,” he says, pointing out that all the products at Bakehouse are baked fresh, unlike the countless corporate bakeries in MTR stations and shopping malls, whose goods are baked off-site in large industrial facilities.

 

The design of each location, which have all been undertaken by local studio CRAFT Design, is meant to underline this. Michaud’s original brief was for transparency: customers should see bakers working, watch trays leave the oven and then buy those products at the counter. In 2021, local visual identity agency Kith&Kin gave Bakehouse a comprehensive rebranding to to keep the bakery’s artisanal identity grounded even if it expanded.

 

But Michaud draws a firm distinction between how food is made and how it is sold. Remember how he said Bakehouse serves one customer every 41 seconds? He knows that because the bakery rigorously tracks every aspect of its production and sales. “After flour, data is our other god,” he says. Thanks to this, he knows that each outlet is different: Stanley sells more loaves of bread; Tsim Sha Tsui is shaped by tourists; Sha Tin attracts families and has a stronger dine-in business; and when it rains, street locations suffer but shopping mall locations benefit. The recipes and products remain the same, but formats, quantities and menus can be adjusted to reflect neighbourhood demand.

 

The next step, which Michaud is currently discussing with his team, is whether Bakehouse will expand outside Hong Kong to other cities in Asia. The question then is whether Bakehouse is still Bakehouse when it leaves the city that made it. “Who are we outside Hong Kong?” asks Michaud.

 

Here, the answer seems clear: it’s a bakery that has shaped Hong Kong as much as Hong Kong shaped Bakehouse. It’s no coincidence that since Bakehouse first opened, Hong Kong has witnessed a profusion of European-style bakeries opened by former Bakehouse employees. “I don’t see this as a negative thing,” says Michaud. “We’re all together creating a movement.”

 

This year, Business of Design Week (BODW) 2026 unveils the theme “Design in Dialogue: Connect + Transform,” celebrating the collaborative partnership between Hong Kong and Switzerland. Among the conversations under the Strategic Design & Reinvention: Brand Transformation, Grégoire Michaud will take the stage with Rocky Yip and James Woodward from Kith&Kin to discuss their creative transformation of Bakehouse. More information here.

 

Writer: Christopher DeWolf  

 

This column is produced in partnership with Zolima CityMag, an online magazine that explores Hong Kong’s arts, design, history and culture.