Trade Names: One of Dublin's best-known bakeries has been brought quietly up-to-date, writes Rose Doyle

The Bretzel Bakery in Lennox Street is everything a bakery should be. Comfortingly intimate, warmed by the smells of baking dough, it's full of seriously difficult carbohydrate choices.

The Bretzel Bakery is also renowned as one of Dublin's best kept secrets. This, some 135 years after it began life as a bakery to the city's Jewish community, is something William Despard, who took over in 2000, intends changing. "Bread is as good for you as cheese," he's adamant, convincing too, "it's the staff of life. People need to know this and we're going to help them find out. Everyone knows about us, but most only have a vague knowledge of where we are."

For those seeking bread handmade from traditional recipes - fired in a fin de siècle stone oven and filled with what the body needs by way of seeds, cereals, fruit and flours - The Bretzel Bakery is in a standalone, three-storey 19th century building at 1A Lennox Street, around the corner from Portobello Bridge and open seven days a week.

It supplies a range of customers, too, but there's nowhere like Lennox Street for a hot treat. Nothing compares to 1A either when it comes to a story in its time and place.

It's hard to believe that William Despard came to the business a relatively short five years ago. He seems born to it, if not bred, and delights in telling you that the Bretzel Bakery is, in fact, "Dublin born and bred since 1870".

A Limerickman, he discovered the bakery 20 years ago when, as a student of engineering in nearby Kevin Street, it was where he went for Sunday morning bread as "soakage for a hangover. It also helped me realise there was bread beyond my mother's great soda bread. I liked it from the first day I came here; no pretensions, just a busy place with good bread."

He's less certain about the bakery's very early history. What seems certain is that a Jewish baker called Grinspon set it up in 1870, then sold it to another Jewish baker, a Mr Elliman, in 1900. The latter bought land attaching at 45 South Richmond Street and built the large, stone oven still in use today.

Elliman's bakery was, William says, the first commercial bakery in the area and served the Jewish community well. In time the business passed to the Steins, again Jewish bakers and, somewhere in the middle of the last century, to the Hackett family.

"Christy Hackett was a baker who worked for Steins," William explains, "who offered it to him when he wanted to sell. Christy said he'd try it for a week, that if he made a profit he'd try a second week. It made a profit."

Fifty years and two generations later William Despard happened along and bought the business from Morgan Hackett. The rest, with business partner Cormac Keenan, is history in the making.

"There was always a Continental influence in the bakery," William says. "The name Bretzel comes from a German bread stick. It was called Steins at one stage; the Bretzel name was given about 60 years ago to reinforce its eastern European origins with rye bread. The main product would always have been the Jewish challah, plaited bread. We make it with good quality white dough and do a celebration version, too, enriched with eggs and butter. Some of our products would be parve - without dairy products - for our Jewish customers."

The Bretzel Bakery was always, "a meeting place on Sunday mornings, right from the early 1900s. It was the place for nurses and medicals coming off night duty in the Adelaide Hospital during the 1950s and 1960s. There used be queues of them outside. I made a lot of trips here on my bike myself, for onion baps and bagels. Bagels were being made here before anyone in Dublin heard of a Manhattan bagel."

He's lyrical on the subject of bagels, on all and any kind of bread in fact. In Lennox Street, he says, they rely on "the intense heat of our stone oven to give ours a unique texture".

The onion baps, and he grins, were the reason he bought the place. "Onions pressed into bread always appealed to me."

He bought "lock, stock and barrel" from Morgan Hackett in the summer of the millennium year. Until then he'd been working as an engineer for a multinational, spending as much time in New York as Dublin, his young family here. "I wanted to be in charge of what I was doing, rather than playing politics in a multinational.

"There was a chance that the bakery might not be bought, that it might go. That really influenced me to buy! The bakery was vibrant but the building needed to be stabilised - it was built in 1830.

"Within a month I knew I needed someone to run it with me, someone who could computerise the business. Cormac was a mate of my wife's and familiar with both accounting and computers. He jumped at the chance to become involved because he believed in the business! We work really well together."

The upper floors of 1A were sealed off from the bakery when he bought it - "inhabited by pigeons". Things weren't so bad as they looked and the top floor is now an apartment, the first, the office, and the slightly extended bakery and shop where they always were on the ground floor.

When he took over, orders were done on the back of a brown paper bag, invoices written with carbon copies into a copy book. They modernised slowly, leaving recipes and baking methods as they were.

"We're afraid to change the shop," he says. "We give it a lick of paint every year and that's it. For the first three years we kept things as they were, to give people confidence in us as the new owners. Then, in the last 18 months or so, we went back to the future, as it were, and started re-making old recipes."

Old/new is their country store loaf. Based on a Holzfaller Brod, made with a rye mash (a 24-hour soak of rye flour, linseed, sunflower seeds and maize) with white flour added for body, it's rolled in seeds and baked in their historic oven. They've brought back old favourites, like banana and carrot cake too.

William is working with Derek O'Brien of the bakery school in Kevin Street "to make sure we get it right, make the best and healthiest bread for people".

He's also involved with about 10 other bakeries in setting up the Artisan Bakers of Ireland. "We'll be small enough to care," he says, "big enough to cope. We're trying to get as far as possible away from plant bakeries. This is about real bread, healthy bread."

The Bretzel Bakery employs a staff of 10, as well as partners William and Cormac. Their bakers and confectioners come from all over, from north Africa, England, Poland, Moldova - even Dublin. Everyone's vital to things and William wants them named: Paul, David, Martin, Sergio, Angel, John, Gomma, Adam, Barbara. They've got one-and-a-half vans (an old and a new model) driven by Fergus and, sometimes William himself or Adam. The invaluable Barbara Stone looks after the trade ordering side of business, Adele and Margaret and part-time students Ailbhe, Sarah and Laura look after customers in the shop.

A quarter of their business happens in the shop, the rest is selling to customers like Foxes in Donnybrook, Mortons in Ranelagh, Donnybrook Fair and Time Out in Dalkey. Restaurants they supply include Fitzers and the new Nonna Valentina in Portobello.

William's wife, Dr Niamh Moran, is a not inconsequential part of things, on hand to advise on the nutritional values of new and old products. He won't even hazard a guess about future roles for daughter Clara (12) or son Oscar (three), saying instead that he sees the bakery "as part of a crusade to get better food into the mouths of Dubliners. When that happens it won't matter who's running it!"