Robert Baker, one of the owners of Cafe Aroma in Eastbourne Old Town, will be turning 90 years of age on March 18 2025.
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00:00We opened this about 18 years ago now. Business has picked up tremendously.
00:06It was quite shabby and run down actually when we took it over.
00:10And we thought, well this place has got possibilities.
00:13Brian found it, but he found it via a friend of his that was a tutor at Eastbourne College.
00:20And I'd known Brian before then, and we were on Hastings Pier.
00:25And that went all pear-shaped. It went bankrupt.
00:29And we had to find somebody pretty quickly.
00:32And he approached this lady and she said,
00:36Oh no, I'm looking for somebody to take it on. I don't want it anymore.
00:40And we took it on.
00:42Well, quite frankly, I think people retire far too early.
00:46And this is what the problem is with a lot of people that possibly get dementia.
00:53They retire too early and they don't have a good diet.
00:59You'd be surprised how many people don't eat vegetables, don't eat meat,
01:05don't eat fish, don't like this, don't like that, don't like something else.
01:09Can't have milk. I think that's a mainstay.
01:13All my life I've had good quality food.
01:19Of course, I was born and bred in the Cotswolds.
01:24So that makes a huge difference, being born and bred in the country and eating proper country food.
01:30But there was none of this business straight from the freezer.
01:36Because it's all processed. Every bit of it's processed.
01:41I can't put my heart on my hand and say,
01:46I can go into a shop and buy a wholesome meal without cooking it myself.
01:52Because you can't.
01:54I run the financial side of it, or try to.
02:00And I can take orders and do the teas and coffees.
02:03I don't do any of the heavy cooking. I leave that to Brian, I have to.
02:06I used to be a photographer.
02:08In the 60s and early 70s, I had about 15 years of it, probably more than that.
02:13And I did a lot of the show business personalities of the day.
02:19Including, if you can call her a celebrity, I suppose she is in a roundabout way, Princess Margaret.
02:26Met a lot of the pop groups.
02:30Jimi Hendrix, The Searchers, The Who, Fifth Dimension, Canteet.
02:40There's a lot more, but I can't remember them all at hand.
02:45Some of them famous, some of them made it, some of them didn't make it.
02:51I just got tired of it, and I just wanted to have a change, have a change of profession.
02:59And find something else to do.
03:03And then I met Brian, and we got along very well together.
03:08And I found out he was a chef.
03:11But he wasn't very happy with his job, he was getting a bit tired of it.
03:17And this came along, and I said, well let's try one unit on Hastings Pier and see how we get on.
03:23And before the end of the term, we'd taken over the whole area of the octagonal room, which was at the end of the pier.
03:33And then things started to happen.
03:36We had theatrical nights, we had musical nights, didn't we Brian?
03:47And that type of thing.
03:49And then all of a sudden, we heard that the pier was under threat, and we had to get off.
03:55And that's how we arrived here.
03:58There's plenty for me to do, I can still continue here.
04:01I've got my garden, I'm very interested in antiques.
04:09I used to work at Sotheby's, so I got quite a lot of knowledge when I worked there.
04:13And that's about it really.
04:17And I think that's enough to be going on with.