The owner of the Green Rhino bakery, Briton Richard Hart, apologized this Monday in Mexico after declaring that in the country “bread culture does not exist”. “I listened to the conversation on the networks and I read your messages. I want to offer you a clear and sincere apology. I was wrong and I deeply regret it,” he said in a statement broadcast on the networks. Hart’s controversial remarks emerge from the podcast Radio PopFoodiepublished in April last year, but has gone viral in recent months. He also defends that Mexican flour is of poor quality and that bolillos are made from “ugly bread”. He also criticized sweet bread: “It’s not bread, it’s cake.”
Green Rhino Bakery is a relatively new establishment located in the Roma Norte neighborhood in the heart of Mexico City, which is experiencing a process of gentrification. The British Tambourine opened the establishment at the end of last June. Hart says today that since moving to the country, he has fallen in love with the people of the capital. “However, my words did not reflect this respect, in this country I am a guest and I forgot to act as such,” he stressed in his writing. And he added: “I don’t expect an apology to erase the grievance caused, but I want to take responsibility for learning and correcting.” » The controversy triggered by these statements led the Green Rhino account to deactivate comments on Instagram.
The name Richard Hart commands respect in the culinary world. He began gaining notoriety in the early 2000s, when he worked at Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. He then co-founded the Hart Bageri bakery in Copenhagen with the Dane René Redzepi. Hart has lived in Mexico City since 2023, when he began developing his latest business idea, the Green Rhino website. “I am very happy that the opening of this new project has finally arrived. It took a long time, but I changed bakers and my menu from two years ago would not at all have reflected what I want today,” he admitted to this newspaper in June.
He chose Mexico because it was halfway between his children’s residence in San Francisco and the continent where he owns several bakeries, Europe. “Mexico is on fire (on fire)! Do you notice it? It’s like when I moved to Copenhagen. So all the chefs came there. Mexico is right at this point,” he explained in this interview. Six months later, and punctuated by his words in a podcast, he now declares that his commitment is to “demonstrate through actions, not words, the respect that Mexican culture deserves.” “I will learn from this unfortunate experience and strive to do better every day,” the writing concludes.
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