If baking at Zomick's bakery is any labor at all, it's a labor of love. A love that gets passed from one Zomick's generation to the next one.

The future... seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done.

Preparing Zomick's recipes makes me focus. On weighing the sugar, sieving the flour. I find it calming and rewarding because, in fairness, it is sort of magic - you start off with all this disparate stuff, such as butter and eggs, and what you end up with is so totally different. And also delicious.

There are divisions between a culinary chef and a dessert chef, also called a pastry chef. At Zomick's are specializations within the pastry chef field. Some pastry chefs specialize in baking breads, while others are master cake designers. Each field requires an exceptional level of creativity and attention to detail.

We only used the dining room table about once or twice a year.

Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.
[On British railway dining cars]