For Shaun Quade and Veronica Fil, their new venture Vandels Bakery is a home-away-from-home.

Looking around Vandels Bakery, it’s like walking into a well-loved, well-lived in home – and that’s exactly what owners Shaun Quade and Veronica Fil were aiming for.

The newly opened Brunswick bakery is decked out with 1970’s inspired décor that, in some instances, quite literally came from the duo’s own home.

Veronica said in a time when people are increasingly looking for comfort and familiarity in their lives, they wanted Vandels to feel like their own home.

“I think people are really over that Scandi minimalist aesthetic that has dominated cafes and restaurants for the past decade,” Veronica said.

“There’s definitely a place for flashier fit-outs, but I don’t think Brunswick is it! We live just down the road, so it just feels like an extension of home.”

This focus on quality and comfort can be found right throughout Vandels, from the interior design to the low-key but carefully crafted and curated range. It’s not surprising given Shaun’s extensive culinary history.

The bakery’s interior theme can be described as curated comfort

With a CV that reads like a who’s who of the Australian culinary world, Shaun has worked in kitchens from Quay to Lume, and The Royal Mail Hotel at Dunkeld during his 20-year career. A chef by trade, Shaun said it was this latter role that gave him his introduction to the world of bread and pastry.

“I have always sought to work with super creative and driven chefs – people who really push themselves,” he said.

“I’d say the job that really had the biggest impact on my development was working with Dan Hunter at The Royal Mail Hotel. Dan had just returned from Spain, where he’d been head chef at Mugartiz, so that vein of creativity was directly influencing his cooking.”

An onsite kitchen garden and orchard that was responsible for the majority of the fresh produce used within The Royal Mail Hotel kitchen further sparked Shaun’s curiosity, but it was being asked to develop a bread program for the restaurant that, he said, proved to be a pivotal moment.

Shaun had no prior baking experience and the last batch of breads he’d made had been at TAFE, so he set about figuring it out.

“I taught myself with the help of Jeffrey Hamelmans’ Bread book. I sourced flour from Wholegrain Milling and quickly realised how much I didn’t know,” he said.

“By the end of my time there I was consistently serving a small selection of naturally fermented breads and understood how to produce them consistently throughout the year – and this was a restaurant kitchen with no provers. As a young chef this gave me a huge dose of confidence, both with Dan pushing me and having faith in my abilities, and me realising that I had the ability to create and serve something at a high level.”

Shaun out the front of Vandels Bakery

Following time spent as a chocolate consultant, Shaun and Veronica – who are partners in life as well as business – co-founded their own business, Grounded Foods, which saw them relocate to the US for a few years.

Shaun described it as an incredible experience, but during this time he ultimately felt removed from all the aspects of the kitchen that he really enjoys.

“You lose that immediate connectivity with your customer, and you start to miss the feedback you get when you can watch them eat what you’ve created,” he said.

“When we returned to Australia, I felt like it was time to get back to basics and do something hyper-local and, more importantly, enjoyable.”

Veronica agreed, adding that after those few years spent in the Silicon Valley start-up world, they really wanted something that was small in scale and just for themselves and their community.

This is where Vandels comes in. From the design of the venue to what they serve up each week, Shaun said it’s all coming directly from him and Veronica.

“It’s whatever we feel like doing, which I think people relate to, especially in an era flooded with AI,” he said.

“Our slogan ‘made by human hands’ came after a particularly passionate rant I went on about AI and how it’s eliminating the element of human touch that makes hospitality special in the first place,” Veronica added.

In a perhaps surprising move, Veronica and Shaun entirely self-funded Vandels, after receiving the advice from a friend that operates several successful restaurants. It was advice, Veronica said, that they initially filed in the ‘it’s easy for him’ basket, but that has in fact proven to be invaluable.

The move forced Shaun and Veronica to be incredibly lean in their decision making, and much of the work behind the scenes to get the space ready – with the exception of the plumbing and electricity – has been a DIY job.

“Admittedly we don’t have the ideal set-up from day one, but it’s very low investment and low risk, and taking small steps is fine by us; not everything has to be about rapid growth,” Veronica said.

“We haven’t spent a dollar on marketing either, which I’m particularly proud of, so the public will have to make do with my badly edited TikToks.”

Veronica adds she and Shaun have very different but complementary skillsets, underpinned by a dislike of working for other people, which is a major reason their partnership works so well.

“I started my career as an economist at the Commonwealth Treasury, which sounds boring but I actually really enjoyed it. I like analysing patterns and predicting trends and advising people on what to do, so it suited me,” she said.

“But I don’t enjoy working for other people, and Shaun’s the same. We like to be able to take our ideas and execute them immediately, rather than have endless meetings and working group sessions to discuss them. So, entrepreneurship has been the answer for both of us.

“He [Shaun] is a hands-on guy, while I like to lurk behind the scenes and work on the business and strategic side of things.”

Given his background, Shaun said many people expected the Vandels range to be all crazy innovation and wizardry, but instead he turned his focus to creating something that was simple but excellent.

Each morning you will find an array of pastries and croissants hitting the shelves alongside a small selection of about 20 loaves of bread.

At its core, the overarching ethos at Vandels is quite simple: just make it delicious.

“Vandels is about consistency and quality. Everything we make has to be delicious, every single time,” Shaun said.

“We’re not really set up to make bread, because we don’t have the equipment for it, But we can’t have a bakery without bread – you just know people are going to ask for it – so we compromise by putting 20 loaves a day through that little oven. It’s not a major part of our menu but people do come specifically for it.”

A small but high-quality range is made onsite

Veronica added that although Shaun was reluctant to have a single hero item within the product range, she had a feeling his Beesting Croissant would be a massive drawcard – and it is.

“This was a point of contention between us, because Shaun didn’t want to have a hero item on the menu – his view being that all the items would be the heroes. I wore him down until he eventually agreed to make it [the Beesting Croissant] a permanent menu fixture,” she said.

Then, by 11am it becomes all about their sausage rolls, which Shaun describes as being quite unique.

“The meat is packed full of fresh herbs and spices – my own secret Colonel mix – loads of caramelised onion and garlic and generous seasoning. The pastry is made, laminated and rested over the course of several days,” Shaun said.

“To complement it, we make our own ketchup on the outdoor smoker from fresh tomatoes.”

Unsurprisingly, the buzz around Vandels has only continued to grow in the months since the doors first opened. Shaun readily admits they weren’t really sure what to expect from their first few months of business, and they had erred on the side of caution.

“No matter how much research you do, there’s no way of really knowing what will happen when the doors open,” he said.

“We were quite conservative in our initial projections, so I was unprepared for how busy the store would get at such an early stage. I thought it might just be the initial opening hype, but we’ve been steadily growing every week since opening, which is amazing.”

Plans for the next few years are also slowly being shaped, beginning with a potential second production space so Shaun and the Vandels team can increase their production output. However, one thing is for certain – everything will be done in its own time.

Veronica said after having done the whole venture capital-fuelled start-up, this time the focus would remain on growing slowly and steadily.

“We’re not looking to build a global bakery empire,” she said.