Some folks just seem to be good at everything they set their mind to. Norman Jean Roy is one of those people. One of the iconic portrait photographers of our generation, Roy got his start doing test shoots at the behest of his aspiring-model girlfriend with a Minolta X-370 when he was 21. As the New York Times’ Nick Marino writes, “Three years later, he moved to Paris with $400 in his pocket and a dream of becoming the next Richard Avedon."

After a long, illustrious career shooting everyone from Joni Mitchell to Serena Williams to Adam Driver for publications like Vogue and Vanity Fair, Roy hung up his camera bag and moved upstate to Columbia County with his wife Joanna Jean Roy in 2014.

“We spent a bit of time unpacking the last 20 to 30 years of our lives — both emotionally and physically,” Roy says. “We wanted to hit the pause button and ask ourselves, ‘Do we want to re-engage in the way we have been, or plant something else?’ Every time I tried to re-engage, I felt this longing to do something else.”

Exactly two years ago this month, the couple was sitting on the couch of their Tagkhanic home when Roy re-floated their longtime back-burner, retirement-pipe-dream idea of opening a bakery together. “I was 49 and still had plenty of gas left in my tank, so I said, ‘What about the bakery?’” he recalls. “We just couldn't come up with any cons except: what if it doesn't work?”

Not one for being deterred by the fear of failure, nor for wasting time, Roy began looking for real estate and researching programs to take his skills from hobby baker to pro. “It was decided literally in one evening,” he says. “I knew nothing about baking. That was a year of learning, training, building, and construction, and a lot of pain and ‘what-have-we-done?’ kind of thing, marching toward the cliff, but also making the cliff move with us.” Ultimately, he enrolled at the prestigious San Francisco Baking Institute, whose artisanal bread program is renowned worldwide.

Rising Action

After ground-up professional training and a yearlong build-out, Breadfolks soft-launched on Warren Street in June, out of a kiosk that was originally meant to be a smaller to-go retail operation to their larger, sit-down cafe—an “afterthought,” Roy calls it. With the risk of COVID looming large, Roy doesn’t know if that larger location will ever open. “The whole bakery was built around this cafe, which is located in the park between Warren and Prison Alley,” he says. “We have an open bakery; it felt vulnerable. Now we may never open it. Who knows how long this will be?”

But don’t fret: Even the small Breadfolks kiosk has garnered meteoric praise in the few months it’s been open, and has a near-constant line around the block. According to Roy, every weekend they have bread tourists who come from as far as Boston, New York City, and the rest of the state for his artisanal, naturally fermented, organic breads and pastries.

“It’s been overwhelming and humbling,” Roy says. “We’ve had people contact us from Texas, San Francisco, Europe asking if we’ll ship. We’ve had so many requests from restaurants in New York City, we’ve been approached by many investors.”

It’s not Roy’s household name, which he hasn’t actively leveraged for attention (though the recent New York Times headline “The Fashion Photographer Who Traded Film for Flour” certainly won’t hurt.) He’s a damn good baker and a savvy businessman too. In conversation, he talks about return on investment and economies of scale; he evaluates the coming round of lockdown with the grim practicality of a seasoned entrepreneur.

Proof of Concept

Even though the pandemic has meant that his flagship location has never been able to open, Roy is still positive overall. “For us, COVID has been a weird blessing in the sense that we’re what I call an ‘affordable luxury.’ A croissant is not a staple, but you still feel like you’re treating yourself,” he says. “People are seeking some semblance of normalcy. So we hit the right product at the right time.”

In addition to their country loaf, which is a traditional sourdough made with whole wheat and rye, Breadfolks bakes everything from baguettes and fougasse to Danish rugbrød, ciabatta, focaccia, rugala, turnovers, caneles, and croissants. “The model is to get bread out on shelves as close to straight out of the oven as possible,” Roy says. “Sometimes there’s a tiny bit of heat left in them.”

While the organic flour for the bread bases is sourced from Utah-based Central Milling, Roy is selectively using local ingredients in his inclusion breads (no this isn’t hippy for unity, it’s baker-ese for bread with added ingredients, like seeds and nuts). “New York State has a lot of really good flour, but for us at this point, it’s more important to establish a consistency, to find an organic grower that has a very non-volatile grain,” he says. The rye berries are sourced from Sparrowbush Farm and Bakery in Livingston, and Breadfolks will soon use local spelt as part of an inclusion.

That yeasty, fresh-baked smell and the crackle of a warm loaf is an intoxicating sense experience. Add to it Breadfolks’ custom-roasted coffees, blended weekly in house, and you have a winning combination.

Breadfolks
322 Warren Street, Hudson
(518) 660-3093
Open Friday-Sunday,  9a.m.-4 p.m.

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Marie Doyon
Marie Doyon