Christoph Nagel is the co-founder of Aube, a bakery in Forest that he started with baker Jean-Yves Pecourt and entrepreneur Thomas Kok. He wasn’t a baker himself, but saw an opportunity in a neighbourhood that was lacking a good food offer and brought together the people needed to make it happen. At Aube, bread is at the centre of a much bigger operation: production, hospitality, coffee and a deliberately generous counter, all run from one open space.
You’ve lived in Forest for quite a while. What made you want to open Aube there?
I’m really in love with my borough. We moved to Forest six years ago, and I was happy to live in the borough where I also have my local business. When I decided I wanted to have my own place, I started looking where people weren’t really looking.
We had moved to Forest because there was still space, and you could find something at a reasonable price. And then, around me, there were a lot of families with young kids, so it felt like we were all at the same moment in life. But what I thought was missing was a good food offer. Even just good coffee, or somewhere to have lunch. Before Aube, and before Bautier opened, it was difficult to find anything in the neighbourhood.
And then you found the building.
Indeed. It was a petrol station first, then a mechanical workshop for cars. It had been empty for about two years. It’s right at the corner of Van Volxem and Van Haelen, so you really see it. It wasn’t supposed to be a bakery at all. But I think if you went there, you could already imagine it. It had these big industrial-looking doors, and because they had taken some of the space to put the cars, you could imagine a terrace, people sitting outside.
I didn’t look for a classic retail space, rather somewhere where we could take bread and create an experience around it. Bread at the centre, and then everything around it: coffee, hospitality, somewhere to sit, somewhere where you could see people working. Once I saw it, I was like, “Shit. Now I have to do it.” I was living in the neighbourhood, and I didn’t think I was going to find two places like this. So I secured it, and then I had to find a baker, because I love bread and I was baking my own at the time. But the scale of what we wanted to do was way above what I could deliver.
That’s when I started putting the team together. Jean-Yves Pecourt became my partner baker and co-founder, and Thomas Kok joined us as well.
How did you find Jean-Yves?
I got really lucky. Or maybe I don’t know if it’s luck. If I don’t know something, I try to find the people who do know.
There was a platform called Tartine et Boterham, which had a guide to bakeries and pastry shops in Brussels and Belgium. I used to work for Yelp, so I knew a bit about this kind of thing. I called the guy who ran it and said, basically, I was looking for a baker. He gave me two or three names, and Jean-Yves was one of them.
He was from Mouscron and had worked in Paris. When I called him, he already had another project lined up with an investor, but it didn’t happen in the end. So we met, I told him about the idea, and he trusted us.
And you trusted that he could bake.
Yeah. Not really. We hadn’t actually tasted his bread. The first bread he made was basically when the oven was installed. So we were joking: “You can bake, right?” Because you go to the bank, you sign the lease, you spend some money, and you’re like, you’re sure you can bake? It would have been the best scam in the world. But voilà. That was three and a half, four years ago.
So, what did you want people to find at Aube?
We knew which neighbourhood we were coming into. You don’t just arrive somewhere and put something at a certain price because you’ve calculated that this is the right price for your business. You also have to think, okay, how are we going to be welcomed by the neighbourhood? How are we going to integrate ourselves into something that’s already there?
So we wanted quite a big choice. If you have the budget for something special, you can find it. But you can also just come and buy a good bread. We have seeded breads, rye breads, and our signature sourdough. And then we have the Dodu, which is a bit like a baguette but in a different format. It’s around two euros. It’s a really good bread to introduce someone who is less familiar with sourdough and organic flour and all that. The signature bread is Jean-Yves’s. It’s wheat, amaranth and buckwheat. The mix gives it this very earthy aftertaste. He had the recipe in mind before Aube and brought it to the project – it’s our best seller.
And everything is sourdough?
Most of it, but we’re not extremists. Sourdough is amazing, but sometimes you want something that’s small and light and very crusty, and then maybe a bit of yeast helps. It depends on what you want to do.
It’s the same with the savoury things. We try to be as vegetarian as we can, because it makes sense to us, but we’re not fanatic about it. If we find a really good Italian finocchiona from a good partner, we might use it.
There’s also a lot on the counter. It feels quite different from some of the very minimal bakeries you see now.
Yeah. I think it’s generosity at max. You go to some places in Copenhagen, for example, and it’s like: marble counter, one cinnamon bun, big price tag. We didn’t want to do that.
When you come into Aube, you see a counter that’s full of products. A big choice. And then everybody can decide what kind of budget they want to put in and what they want to eat.
You’ve described Aube as chaotic. Why?
It’s chaotic and it’s amazing. When I was living in London, I was in London Fields in Hackney, and there was E5 Bakehouse. They were underneath the Overground, in the arches. They started with one arch, then they grew very organically. At some point they had one arch for classes and production, one for the shop and another one where you could eat. I loved it. It was organised chaos. You could walk through the workshop, see people working, and everything was very transparent. You could see what they were using. If you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to walk through the workshop and find it. It was a bit of a maze.
I don’t need polished. I don’t need everything to be absolutely perfect. If I stand outside Aube and look in from far away, I’m like, “Oh gosh, so many people.” It’s chaotic. Everybody knows what they’re doing, I hope. But I like it. It’s a living thing.
And the production is really part of the space.
Yeah. Everything is done there. All the bread, the pastries, all the savoury things. Almost everything is made in-house. The bakery is one big open space, with the hospitality area and terrace on one level and the workshop a few steps below. Down there, the dough is made and processed, then shaped before everything goes into the huge fridge overnight. You could imagine a small Parisian studio as a fridge. It’s kind of the same size. Then at four in the morning someone comes in, the oven is already hot, and they start baking until around nine.
It’s a choreography, a dance, really, to make sure that everybody and everything can happen in parallel in this small space. We outgrew the space pretty much straight away. Now we’re around 12 to 14 full-time equivalents, so it’s quite a big operation.
You’re not a baker yourself, though.
No. And that’s exactly the point. I knew I wanted to run this kind of project, but I wasn’t a baker. Does that mean I couldn’t do it? No. It means you find the people who have the skills and you bring them together.
That’s really my role: being the connector between all these people. Of course, once the project exists, there’s management and everything that comes with it. But my biggest added value in this particular project is putting the right people together.
Did you always think like that?
I don’t know. I was always much more interested in people, social subjects and communication than in something specific like law or medicine. My father used to say that these were easy things, that I was good with people and languages, and asked where the challenge was.
Do you think he had a point?
Maybe I could have pushed myself a little harder. The things I love doing today — going to people, welcoming them, serving them, hospitality — have always come very naturally to me.
Sometimes I think I would have benefited from choosing something I wasn’t naturally good at. I did promise my father I’d do a year of economics before studying communication. And I did. I was good at all the human and social subjects, psychology, languages — and then came accountancy. I thought this wasn’t happening, that my brain couldn’t function like that. So eventually I thought, forget it. I’ll do what I want.
When you’re eighteen or twenty, you’re still a kid, but you’re expected to choose what you want to do with your life. And I was always a bit like, I have no idea. I don’t know what I want to do. Now I think there’s something to be said for following what comes naturally to you. You don’t have to be an expert at everything you do. You can always reinvent yourself. Adaptability is the key word.
And you’re already thinking about what might come next for Aube?
The question of development is always there. It’s good to have the idea somewhere in the back of your mind and wait until things align. But I already see how hard it is to manage one place at the scale we’re doing. There’s a lot of value in spending time putting the processes in place.
There are areas in Brussels that could really benefit from what we do. Boitsfort is one. It’s very family-oriented, green, and there’s a real demand for good food, but not much of an offer. People keep telling me to come if they find me a spot. So maybe. If the stars align.
And Brussels still feels like the right place for all these projects?
Yes. I came back from London because we wanted to build a family and we had our friends and family here. But also, this is my city. There’s still a lot that deserves to be done here. There are talented people, creative people, and people with the grit to actually do something locally. I like that. It’s a life of projects. And if something doesn’t work out, it’s fine. You just start again.
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Christoph is one of the 73 locals who has generously contributed to our city guide 'Brussels by locals' by sharing his favourite spots in town.
Interview: Sisse Bro
Photography: Stephanie De Smet