About Us

Elio Massimiliano, who is originally from a small village in Calabria called Laurignano, founded Regency Bakery forty years ago this month. It’s been in the same location on Regent Street for more than three decades and has become an institution in our community. Working as a baker in Italy, Elio had always hoped to go in business for himself in Canada. After getting his start at Cecutti’s Bakery for a number of years, he opened the original Regency storefront just down the road on Bouchard, drawing in many from the Italian community who were looking for a taste of home.

 

It’s no small feat to operate a business for four decades and a key reason Regency has been able to keep its doors open for as long as it has is by how it treats it customers. That has always been Elio’s philosophy. “Treat the customer good,” he says. He explains how back in the day he felt businesses were more service oriented and many of the customers were your friends.

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Paolo was just a year old when Regency started, but he’s been involved with the business pretty much his entire life. “We didn’t have a choice,” he jokes. As a teenager he worked there full-time in the summer and throughout university while studying economics. He spent a lot of that time baking, but he also cleaned, packaged orders, and prepared pastries. “Whatever I had to do, I did,” Paolo said.

 

Paolo later took some time away from the bakery when he went to culinary school. After working as a chef for a few years in Muskoka and Barrie, and then as the head chef at the Idylwylde Golf & Country Club, he came back to Regency nine years ago and took over the business with his eldest brother, Max. Paolo is now the sole owner, but it’s clear that his father’s fingerprints all over the way Regency still does business.

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“It’s a business that has thrived off tradition,” he said. “People who grew up with a family tradition of coming here for Christmas or Easter. You get the kids and it keeps falling down the line, and now they come here with their kids too. You gain lifelong clients.”

 

That’s why he gets up every morning at five o’clock to come in and bake bread and why he will keep waking up at that time, before most of us have even rolled out of bed, to carry on his own family’s traditions; the recipe for that bread has remain unchanged for the past four decades. While the ingredients have stayed the same, Paolo treats every day as a new experience and a renewed opportunity to honour his family’s work.

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In forty years he hopes Regency looks just like this, but with a fresh coat of paint.

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