I have started to feel that over the last few months the bakery is beginning to lose the plot somewhat.
When they first started they seemed to have found a solid groove and produced baked goods of a high quality at great prices. Now the food seems to have slipped into mediocrity at best (except the loaves of bread) and the prices are becoming, excuse the pun, hard to swallow.
I have to laugh every time I go in there and see a chocolate cookie the size of a five dollar coin for 9 dollars! That is more expensive that Mrs fields for a bigger cookie and higher than Godiva by weight!
The staff also seem to have been selected for their genuine denseness (a calculator to add 10 and 18?!) and the baker is a grumpy bugger to say the least!

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I agree Ed...I think the guy who set it up either sold the business or is no longer in charge and it is just becoming very medicore.

I don't go there at all now as a result

What a shame! Had i been staying in Hong Kong I would have taken over the bakery i was offered it but we had already made plans to move out of Hong Kong.

9 days to go

True, last time I bought a pineapple bun which is something very common and end up with just flour in my mouth. That's my last visit there.

Well, I was a regular, frequent customer before who really liked the place, but I'm not going there much anymore...

The guy in charge is still in charge, I believe. I met him a week or so ago in the Deli Lamma Lan Kwai Fong by coincidence and as a friend and former advertiser, I assume he'd have told me if he'd sold the business.

I've wanted to do an "Inside the Village Bakery" editorial Lamma-zine story for a long time. I did three (unpublished) photo shoots for the story already, back in the Bakery's "good old days", on his request. But he's always "too busy" for the story or the bakery is "not ready yet to be featured". The story will probably never happen...

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I bought a chocolate croissant for the ferry ride and ended up giving it to one of the deckhands for a spare anchor!

I guess Charlie is a very silent partner at the moment!

I love the bread and I'm a regular purchaser of their various pasties. Their raisin twists (at $8.00) represent pretty good value I think. But, I've tried their cheesecake and found it to be of average to poor quality and thus grossly overpriced. And I agree totally about the cookies – my kids often want me to buy them but I have always refused until recently because of the ridiculous prices. Recently, I relented, feeling particularly flush after a good paycheck, but found the cookies were not special at all. They were so literally ‘run-of-the-mill’ that I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found their rubbish bin stuffed with Christie’s or Dare Cookies bags – Best Buy even!

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The friendly salesgirl claimed that the cookies are baked exactly to the recipe of Mrs. Fields.
I thought that she must be kidding - after buying and trying one - but she wasn't...

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Interesting that some of you rate the bread - we always thought it poor quality or bland at best, and only ever bought it there when desperate - but for about the last year or so regarded the bread as so bad it wasn't worth buying full stop. The only things we buy there thesedays, and only occasionally, are the cinnamon buns and doughnuts. If they sort the bread out we'll be happy to go back - CitySuper's bread isn't anything special, though their sticks are much better.

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The bread is ok the rye anyway. The scones you got to watch they sell them for days when they are like rocks. What other option on Lamma if you don't want 'Garden' bread, that is made from human hair protein rather than yeast.

The sausage rolls used to be good...

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I love sausage rolls but not theirs. Very dry, strange smell and very expensive. Cannot even compare to Maxim's who sells it for something like less than half the Bakery's price.

But trying to stay positive, let's remember more of what we LIKED in the Village Bakery before its downhill spiral:

Their funny, three-coloured, plaited, soft bread. The all-white version of this "zopf" was a Sunday-breakfast-only treat when I grew up.

The wholewheat square bread is quite tasty (if you eat it fresh, as it turns mouldy within two days outside the fridge.)

Some of the meat pies are really tasty. Crispy croissants. OK walnut bread.

But for really fine and unusual baked goods, few places in town can beat the (incredibly overpriced) City!Super bakery...

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On a positive note, this means that it is not stuff-full of preservatives like the 'garden' bread which will last about 3 weeks!
The loaves from Green Cottage are good- the same bread they use fo rtheir sandwiches.
L-G, I think you have been going to a different Mrs. Fields than the rest of us if you think the Village Bakery cookies are even close to theirs!

So if the Bakery bread is no good and City Super bread is no good (and overpriced), where does one get good bread in Hong Kong? Along those lines, is there any place to buy bagels? Everyone sells cream cheese in the stores, but I can't find a bagel to go with it.

The best bread we have found is in GREAT - the deli-supermarket in the basement of Seibu, Pacific Place, including good bagels and plenty of other stuff. Oliver's deli in the Prince Building tries but isn't as good.

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Park and Shop in Aberdeen have a new bakery section with some nice breads.
They bake on the premises and are very good . They sell bagels all for a fraction of the price of any of the above named rip off joints.
Not saying P&S is not a rip off joint but this new bakery in Aberdeen is super

Is it "new"? There's been an in-store bakery there for years.

My wife sometimes picks up some breads at a classy bakery in TST on the way home; about half price near closing time.

Agreed that for many things GREAT and Olivers are stupidly expensive, but their bread and bakery produce is reasonably priced. BTW, this morning I discovered that PRET do very good warm croissants, though probably only for early birds.

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You'd think that even if the village bakery can't make great bread, it'd at least try to sell it hot & fresh. I've never found anything even warm in there or smelt that great smell of freshly baked bread wafting out - two no brainers for luring people into a bakery shop I'd thought, although the aroma might get mixed with the toilets and garbage station on the approach. Has anyone tried using one of those home bread making machines? Much hassle/any good?

Aaahhh, the innocence of anyone thinking that any business on Lamma would actively try and attract customers through anything more than opening their doors and sticking a hand-written paper on the wall.
The only two places which try anything are the Banyan Tree and the Island Bar.
The Village bakery could do a lot to improve itself and justify their high prices but so long as people accept the status quo and weekend tourists can't walk 20 yards without stuffing some sort of vile crap in their mouth.
The only person who gets any kudos on the island is the woman who spends 9 dollars on a packet of 20 individually wrapped crackers, 3 dollars on a packet of skewers and 15 dollars on a jar of peanut butter and sits on the corner opposite the old Y2K. She carefully opens the packets of crackers, smears peanut butter on them, sticks a 2" long piece of skewer down the middle, puts the wrapper over the top and stands them up in a piece of styrofoam. All she has to do is wait for the tourists who have managed to get from the waffle shop alive before needing more food and selling them for 5 dollars.

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