When baker-pastry chef couple Doug Gregory and Lauren Ahn lived together in London, U.K., they used to fantasize about owning their own little bakeshop downstairs below their apartment building. Several years later – after an unexpected turn of events – the couple finally made that dream a reality with the opening of Mari Bakeshop, a cozy little bakery in the heart of Calgary’s East Village specializing in Korean roll cakes, pint-sized choux pastries and traditional European breads and loafs.
Lauren and Doug first met in the U.K. working for the Corbin & King restaurant group and began dating shortly thereafter. At the time Lauren – a native Calgarian – had just graduated from the highly acclaimed Le Cordon Bleu while Doug was a seasoned baker who’d worked his way up after starting as a restaurant kitchen cook. The duo left London to go work at the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group in California, but wound up working opposite shifts and never seeing one another. So they left and came to visit Lauren’s hometown Calgary as they furthered their search for work together. “We were trying to find a job pretty much all over the world,” Doug says. “The problem was because we’re both quite senior and we’ve both worked at three-Michelin-star restaurants, it is very difficult to find a job together.”
After scouring the globe for work opportunities that would allow them to work together, the couple started to talk about launching their own venture. “We threw around the idea of opening up a shop in Calgary. It’s grown and restaurants have changed a lot. There may be a place for us, is what we thought,” Doug says. “We could see what they were planning on doing with the East Village and we could see that there’s a lot of potential here for growth.”
