The Untold Story of Dover Street Market’s Rose Bakery
Ascend the spiral stairs at Dover Street Market in London and resist the COMME des GARÇONS coming at you from all angles. Do not be distracted by the Balenciaga coats that call out like drippy Sirens during your odyssey to the top floor. Turn left past Elena Dawson’s textured, time-traveling garments and there you will find carrot cake. You’ve arrived at Rose Bakery, the ultimate destination café inside the ultimate destination department store. Sit down and stay a while.
Rose Bakery has been a part of Dover Street Market since the first store opened on Dover Street in 2004 (today the store is on Haymarket, just south of Piccadilly Circus). Since the heady mid-2000s, they’ve expanded to three more locations in Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles. Each DSM has its own particular flair, from bespoke food to the interior design, yet each of them reflects the special chemistry between Rose Bakery and Rei Kawakubo’s shopping vision. Think Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food, but dressed for fashion week. It’s a port of call for serious shoppers in need of a pit stop, and a reliable power lunch spot for media and fashion elites.
Before it was a part of DSM, Rose Bakery was destined to become one of the fashion world’s most important eateries. Founded in Paris in 2002 by Rose and Jean-Charles Carrarini, it began with a clear concept — to bring English baking (and English vibes) to Paris. The pair quickly found themselves catering fashion shows, hosting scene lunches, and selling cheese and fresh vegetables to Paris’ connoisseurs.
When they set up in the first DSM in London, it was clear that they wouldn’t be your average retail restaurant. Some brands open a banquette or cart where they can sell you coffee with your clothes. Some big department stores boast a fancy restaurant where you are served a thousand-dollar meal in addition to a thousand-dollar dress. Rose Bakery x DSM feels more like a bona fide fashion collab between like-minded creatives. It’s also a family enterprise. Rose’s brother is Adrian Joffe, Kawakubo’s husband and president of COMME des GARÇONS.
Even before they were working with their in-laws, the Carrarinis were embedded in fashion. Before food, Rose trained as a painter and Jean-Charles grew up in a family that worked in the industry. Neither had any culinary training. They met, married, and started a family and their own knitwear brand, ROZ JOFFÉ. After a few years, though, they realized that the business, and the lifestyle, didn’t suit them.
The idea is to find what people are good at and then encourage them. We give a frame to the menu, but what is inside depends on the type of chef.
“We traveled all over the world, but we hated fashion shows,” Jean-Charles tells me. “We only went to food stores. Maybe that was a strange thing for fashion people to do.”
They put ROZ JOFFÉ behind them and opened a food shop in London, importing quality French goods to the UK — Poilâne sourdough, fancy cheese and the like. They soon realized, however, that simply selling food wouldn’t work as a business model, so they expanded to include a tiny restaurant and some takeout. That was the first seed.
“We decided to reverse the idea,” says Jean-Charles. “We were bringing French food to London, but then we decided to bring English food to Paris.” The model, of a store where you could sit down for lunch or buy fresh produce, was the same.
Jean-Charles says that they immediately found a home and started making a name for themselves in France, in part because of the relationships they had built when working on ROZ JOFFÉ. “When we arrived in Paris, we called all our fashion friends.” One of those friends was Colette Roussaux, the woman behind the influential boutique Colette, which closed in 2017.
“We phoned Colette and said, ‘We’re coming to Paris,’ and she said, ‘Okay, you’re going to supply me.’” She was hosting an extravagant party, renting out a whole train from Paris to a popular nightclub in Belgium. “You do the food,” she told the Carrarinis. They weren’t on the train itself, but nearly every influential person in Paris fashion was.
“I delivered the food,” Jean-Charles remembers. “We didn’t put any name. We just said, ‘We’re coming,’ on the box. Nobody knew who we were or where.” The catering stunt had the desired effect. “It was totally instantaneous,” Jean-Charles says, less of an opening and more of a homecoming. “That’s what we are, we came from fashion.”
And so a decade went by, and Rose Bakery settled in and expanded throughout Paris. Jean-Charles worked front-of-house while Rose ran the kitchen, making simple, organic food that she describes as “what chefs cook at home.”
“Rose understands what people eat,” says Jean-Charles. “It’s more a philosophy than a type of cooking. We’re not there to change the food. The food is the food.” While this may sound reductive, the sauce-heavy tradition of French cuisine that was ubiquitous in Paris at the time made it quite radical. There’s also a clear commitment to how the food is cooked. Rose’s most recent cookbook, 2013’s How to Boil an Egg, isn’t so much a collection of recipes as a manual for every possible use case, from poaching an egg in tofu hot pot to just, you know, scrambling it.
Which brings us to a pro-tip (or perhaps a hot take). At Rose Bakery, go savory. You can also go sweet, but if you really want the richest experience on offer, go for a salad or similar. Let the veg shine. (Jean-Charles, for what it’s worth, recommends an omelet.)
Back in 2004, Kawakubo hadn’t yet found anyone whose food fit the white-walled aesthetic of the new store. “That’s what Rei Kawakubo was looking for — simple,” says Jean-Charles. “But simple is difficult.” Joffe and Kawakubo knew the Carrarinis could do it, even if it wasn’t immediately obvious how. They had never opened a Rose Bakery inside a larger entity, and the model would need to adapt. But they were confident they could figure it out. Besides, “if Rei Kawakubo wants, then you say I’m going to do it,” Jean-Charles says with a chuckle.
So they figured it out, first in London, then, as DSM expanded, in Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles. Each space has its own quirks. The seventh floor location in Tokyo is an entirely separate proposition to the outdoor pavilion in LA, for example. The food also varies somewhat from location to location.
“From the start we wanted Rose Bakery to be a creative place and we are still experimenting all these years later,” Rose has said. To that end, she is less interested in drilling chefs on their textbook approach to pumpkin loaf cake than in sourcing good ingredients. With Rose, Jean-Charles says, “The idea is to find what people are good at and then encourage them. We give a frame to the menu, but what is inside depends on the type of chef.”
The restaurant and retail alliance isn’t anything new. Macy’s opened the South Tea Room in 1907, which still operates today as the Walnut Room. Since then, stores have hosted all kinds of dining experiences, from L’Avenue at Saks Fifth Avenue to the Orange Julius in the food court at your local mall. Ralph Lauren and Armani operate their own restaurants all over the world. Brands like Aimé Leon Dore have opened their own cafés.
The partnership with Dover Street Market has allowed Rose Bakery to scale across continents. DSM, meanwhile, gets to host a secondary attraction within its walls, a restaurant that brings not only good food, but a philosophy with plenty of cultural cred. That may be the most lasting thing about their collaboration: it’s a model for others on how to do it.
The Carrarinis’ union with Dover Street Market is more than just a restaurant in a store—it’s two different types of creative minds securing common ground. At Rose Bakery in DSM, that common ground transforms a piece of carrot cake from dessert into something unique.
