From a career in fine dining that has taken him around the globe to claiming the 2024 MasterChef Australia Dessert Masters title, John Demetrios has already achieved a lot in his time in the industry. Next up on the list for the Melbourne-based pastry chef is a bakery – Butter Days Bakery – which he recently opened with his wife, Martina.

It has to be said straight from the start: Butter Days Bakery isn’t your average bakery.

With an emphasis on producing a small range of high-quality pastries featuring seasonal ingredients, the Malvern-based bakery is the culmination of months of hard work by pastry chef John Demetrios and his wife, Martina, who is a front-of-house professional.

Located in a former restaurant space in inner city Melbourne, John said a large amount of time had been dedicated to transforming the space into their ideal bakery, which opened its doors in October to great excitement.

“We transformed the dining room into our retail space and a bit of a work area,” he said.

“That was always the plan, but there were loads of surprises in the back kitchen area – a lot of old building surprises – which is really funny because when I talk to people who’ve been through it and they’re more experienced than I am, they’re like ‘yeah, of course there were surprises’.

“It was just me being naïve, thinking I didn’t have to do that much, but we did. We did a lot of renovations out the back in the end, but I feel like we’ve done it now and it should set us up for the future. We shouldn’t be getting any surprises five years down the track.”

In addition to the months spent renovating the bakery space, John, Martina and the Butter Days Bakery team were busy behind the scenes carefully curating the product range of pastries, cakes and savoury items.

Butter Days Bakery focuses on rustic items, done well

Recipe development and testing got into full swing, however, once they opened the bakery doors reality set in and the team had their work cut out for them to simply make enough products to meet consumer demand each day.

John said the Butter Days Bakery’s immediate popularity far exceeded what they had expected and so they went back to the drawing board, simplified their offering instead, and focused on creating just a few products done exceptionally well.

“The first few weeks of business have been absolutely crazy. It was a little overwhelming at the start, to be honest,” he said.

“We had a few quick sell outs that we weren’t really prepared for. But since then I think we’ve found our feet. We’re definitely not running out and we’re producing a lot more. And, we’ve got to meet a lot of the locals and see what they want, which is shaping the products that we now make.”

One item in particular, the Sunshine Bun, became so popular it was being sold almost direct from the oven, long before it hit the shelves.

John describes this as the Butter Days Bakery take on the Norwegian solboller – or sun bun – and is a laminated malted pastry with a custard of lemon and cinnamon.

“Our hero item is the Sunshine Bun, which we were selling out of rapidly, so we had to focus on tripling the production of those,” John said.

“It was insane. They were coming out of the oven and getting sold before the tray was put down.”

Currently the Butter Days Bakery daily menu consists of a variety of both sweet and savoury items with a strong focus on laminated pastries, while desserts, cakes, tarts and biscuits are brought out in the afternoons.

Moving forward, a range of breads that will be used in-house for lunch sandwiches are also set to be added, while a combination of seasonal ingredients and the needs of their local Malvern community will continue to shape the Butter Days Bakery overall product range.

With his and Martina’s background you would be forgiven for assuming Butter Days Bakery’s products would be high-end in both appearance and style, but John said this was something they had deliberately veered away from.

Instead, he said it was important for them as a business that their consumers never felt overwhelmed by what’s on offer.

“The product is different but the process is the same. We’re still taking our time to really test things thoroughly. There’s a lot of back and forth,” he said.

“What we’re trying to do is not make it too refined – a bit more rustic and approachable. There’s actually been times we’ve made something and said ‘you know what? That’s too fancy’, so we’ve scrapped it. Whereas in the restaurant world it’s the opposite and you’re trying to sharpen things up.”

Butter Days Bakery is in Malvern

Now the first few hectic months are behind them, John said their focus was once again turning to recipe development, this time to create what he calls the new Butter Days Bakery staples.

“These will be the go-tos, which we didn’t have before. We plan to be super seasonal and just get driven by what fruit is available and things like that. We’ve not taken anything off [the menu] yet. We’ve just kept adding,” he said.

“I would like Butter Days Bakery to be somewhere where people come all the time and just trust that whatever they buy will be great.”

You may think a bakery is a far cry from John and Martina’s previous roles, which for John has included working as Head Pastry Chef for three Michelin star chef Pierre Koffman at the London restaurant Koffman’s, as well as at two Michelin-starred Oaxen Krog in Sweden, where he met Martina.

However, John said Butter Days Bakery actually represented a full circle moment for him career-wise.

“My first hospitality job was at Bakers Delight, so I guess I’ve done a full 360,” he said.

“I’ve found the bakery scene, as it’s been getting better and better around the world, to be my biggest inspiration in the past few years.”

John said he and Martina had realised they had reached the point where they were ready to have their own business, and a bakery seemed a natural progression.

“We were spending a lot of time thinking about it. It fits our lifestyle and we also really like the idea of getting to know people’s names and that side of things,” he said.

“Having someone who understands what we need without have to say step-by-step is great. We’ve had a whole new team, so having each other as support has really paid off.”