In Thomazo, one family’s local bread has risen from a roadside staple into something closer to a national treasure. For Ambrose Fara Mongroo, the man behind the oven, bread has become both livelihood and legacy.
For over a decade, his brick-oven bread was known mostly to travellers who pulled over as they drove through Saint Lucia’s southeastern hills and valleys. But in recent years, videos shared on social media have turned him into something of a celebrity.
“People would visit, take videos, then come back years later and show me on their phones,” Mongroo shares while sitting near the table where countless loaves are being prepped by young hands. He smiles at the memories. “One even brought and showed me a marble with my picture inside it. Another told me, ‘You’re famous! I saw you on the big screen in Italy.’”
The secret to the bread’s popularity may be in the oven itself — a low, fire-fed brick chamber that can bake 100 loaves at a time. “When it’s really hot, sometimes it only takes five minutes,” explained Mongroo’s daughter Sico, as she mans the shop’s front. She is one of Mongroo’s ten children, some of whom help run the operation. When the oven cools down, baking can take a little longer, ten maybe 15 minutes, but the oven can hold its heat for up to a week — a rhythm that shapes their daily life — explains Kevin, Mongroo’s son, as he shuts the oven’s entrance with a large covering.
Mongroo says brick ovens help with taste by keeping the bread’s ingredients preserved and untainted by less foreign elements. “You’re not putting it on metal… The taste you get from that brick oven — you can’t get it with an electric one.”
Bread has played a central role in his life, but it wasn’t always so. Before the oven, Mongroo cultivated bananas, splitting his time between Saint Lucia and Martinique. “It was a friend who showed me how to make the local bread before I started going to Martinique,” he recalled. For years, his work saw him travelling between the two countries every 15 days, until border formalities and travel costs pulled him home for good.
That return marked a turning point. Already trained in local bread-making, Mongroo set up a small brick oven to feed his family — and, eventually, to build his business. “From the start it went well, and up to now it’s still going well,” he said, pointing to the modest oven near the bakery’s entrance that sparked it all. Over time, increasing demand pushed him to build the larger brick oven to the back of their bakery.
Generosity has also shaped the business. Mongroo says he tries to encourage the forgiving of small debts. “If someone comes and they’re missing a quarter, I tell them, ‘Don’t let the person go hungry,’” he said.
For years, when he could be more hands-on in the bakery, he used Christmas as a time to give away plaited loaves for free.
Now in his eighties, Mongroo looks to his children to carry on the business he built from fire and flour. Their presence is everywhere in the shop — moving between the storefront and the bakery. Sico herself takes pride in their simple but beloved product offerings and in her own small innovations. “Usually, people want cheese, salami, luncheon meat, butter, saltfish or sausage,” she explains. However, her own creation — saltfish mixed with cheese — may well be on its way to becoming a quiet bestseller.
