Best Bakers — Restaurant in Kerala

The production unit, at Bakery B (Best Bakers), is spread over four floors of the 12,000 sq.ft building at Kacheripady. We walk in to an air-conditioned room, on the third floor, lined with tables and racks of cakes in varying stages of production, mounds of whipping cream and chefs icing and piping the cakes before they are rolled into the cold room for storage. Close to 1,000 cream cakes are made, from scratch, daily. In another colder, smaller room, a chef rolls out pastry sheets. On the floor below, two sweet makers squeeze jalebi batter into boiling oil, ‘mixture’ is being mixed, and barfi is being packed. It has a menu of more than 800 items—confectionery, savouries, cakes, breads, and Indian sweets. More than 80 % of what you buy at a Bakery B outlet is manufactured here.

At the gate, a steady line of delivery vehicles flows out loaded with breads, buns, cakes, confections and sweets headed for 46 outlets spread across the city—Thodupuzha, Vaikkom and Thalayolaparambu. Best Bakers, as it is still referred to despite the change of name in 2013, has come a long way since 1967, when founder AK Vishwanathanan bought Lotus Bakery on Broadway’s Jew Street, investing ₹7,000 into it and renaming it Best Bakers.

The smells of baking and frying waft in to Vishwanathanan’s office on the second floor. These days he doesn’t spend as much time at the factory as he used to, as Bakery B today has grown to a 600-strong establishment. The production unit alone has 220 employees, who work in two shifts. In the initial days it was Vishwanathan and one other employee. “I would be manning the borma (coconut shell-fired oven) while the other guy would man the counter,” he says. Old time bakers and bakeries of Kerala trace their roots to Thalassery, Vishwanathan was also born there. His father had several businesses, among which was a small shop that sold bread and rusk. His elder brother moved to Kottayam and set up a bakery where Vishwanathan spent three years there learning the essentialsof making bread, rusk and a couple of types of biscuits.When he, all of 22, came to Kochi from Kottayam, it was not the best time to set up a business whose primary component was refined flour (maida). The 1960s were a time of acute shortage of food grain in the State, as a result of which there were regulations on how much everybody got through the public distribution system.

“The quota was around three sacks of maida (which is around 90 kilos) and 60 kilos of sugar, on a permit from the rationing officer. It is not easy to run a bakery business on these amounts... this was for the entire month,” says Vishwanathan, now 73. “We bought maida from the black market and from bakers who weren’t able to use their quota... imagine!” Over the next couple of years, and some convincing later, he managed to get eight sacks of maida. The quota was increased when he got the order to deliver bread to the Government Hospital. Those days he used to cycle from Kacheripady to Kalamassery, around 14 km away, to deliver bread to customers there.

In 1971 Best Bakers moved do Kacheripady. “Those days there were a few shops in Kacheripady. The kind with wooden planks as doors. My father retained the Jew Street shop as well. It was popular among the traders who would pop in for some snack—biscuit or rusk,” says Vijesh, Vishwanathan’s elder son. Around this time, tea cakes were introduced to the menu. He remembers his childhood spent in the bakery, even sitting at the cash counter with...

Did the purchase through online portal. Apart from the third part y PayUbiz there was no response from the bakers side .Had two oders on same day . Delivery was delayed for both though it was hardly more than 5 kms from the bakers for first delivery . Website status say as "Processing" even after actual delivery .. Card and cake were not written as specified .Cakes tasted okie. .In short go and buy from the shop or form...

Great bakery with a fab variety of snacks - savoury and sweet both. Lots of packaged food available too to satiate those early evening hunger pangs. Very friendly staff who are quick to serve and make the drinks to your liking. Do stop over to check out the Sharjah shake (I won't mention the ingredients, that's a surprise) and try out the egg puffs. Two of my standards and I think worth trying out. Reasonably priced and...