Address: 1311 St Clair Ave W, Toronto ON
Website: http://tremaribakery.ca/
Style: Italian, Portuguese
Price: $-$$
Tre Mari looks like and *is* an institution in the heart of Corso Italia. Fifty years old, I believe it's also the only Italian bakery in the neighbourhood. With those kind of stats, how could I NOT end up here while exploring the area? :P I suppose Tre Mari is your typical Italian "bakery" (at least here in Toronto) in that you've also got your coffee shop and hot table and deli. In addition to this, they have a fairly impressive variety of cakes, cookies, baked goods (though I recognized a vast majority of these to be Portuguese) and, of course, traditional Italian (well, Sicilian -- as the poster on the wall with a picture and description of each item claims) pastries: cannoli stuffed with cheese or chocolate, sfogliatelle, choux puffs in a variety of shapes and toppings, tiramisu, etc. Although I must say I sometimes have a hard time picking stuff out at an Italian bakery, I really had a tough time narrowing it down to three items. After a long wait, I ended up with these goodies ^^:
Well, I ended up trying two, since the brother snatched up the tiramisu ($2.75) as soon as he could. He's a fan, I suppose. Strangely enough, this classic of classics actually ended up the least exciting from the bunch and came out a bit of a disappointment. The cheese, cream and layered ladyfingers were there alright, but there was nowhere enough liquor for the drenched effect to be there and the dessert came across as rich, but too "dry" for it to compare to other places.In a somewhat odd though at the same time predictable twist, while the others didn't seem that exciting and definitely weren't looked forward to like the tiramisu was, they proved to be the better ones of the bunch. The first of these two was a fairly simple apple cake ($1.75)
: chunks of apple stuffed inside a soft layer of dough which was glazed and coated with slivered almonds on top. There was nothing really "special" about this thing, but it was good! My mom was actually accusing me of getting something so boring, and I'm not exactly sure what to say about it to make it sound as good as it tasted, but it was just yummy! I loved the dough wrapped around the apples, and yes, I'm horrible at this, but good stuff! :PReally not sure of item #3, I settled on this.. ball ($2.25) based on the icing and cherry on top. It looked like a mini, coated doughnut! ^^;; All I could see was that and that there was some sort of cream or custard stuffed in the middle of it. Bringing it back and examining it in more detail,
I could smell two things: lemon and alcohol. Ohhh, it looks like I ended up with the right thing. :DDDD This was pretty much a ball of lemony, slightly liquor-soaked sponge cake cut in half, filled with lemon custard, and drenched on top with a hard sugar glaze. Perhaps it could have needed a tad more liquor in the dough (yes, I am very pathetic), but other than that, the opinion was unanimous: very good and much better than the tiramisu!Well, here comes the end verdict: I can see why they've been around so long. ;) And yup, definitely worth a return visit!
Rating: ***1/2
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