Bagel House

Bakery: Bagel House
Address: 235 Lakeshore Rd E, Mississauga ON
Website: http://www.thebagelhouse.com/
Style: Jewish
Price: $-$$ 

I was pretty excited to find that Bagel House, the Montreal-style bagel chain in Toronto, was opening up a location in Mississauga, although I can't say I was there for the bagels (then again, am I ever there for the bagels? ;P). Actually, before the Cake Tour existed, I visited the Avenue Rd location and had a pretty darn good poppy seed triangle (with the poppy seeds baked into the dough itself and the size just huge *-*); they also had your usual chocolate buffaloes and rugullah. In a sense, they don't have all that much (which seems to be fairly typical of bagel places), but I was still expecting what their online menu had in terms of treats at their Mississauga location. In comparison to the other locations, the Mississauga location... has bagels. Obviously people don't buy anything else and, as such, selection and freshness for everything else is next to nonexistent. Put simply: no poppy seed triangles, no triangles at all, and, well, no poppy seed at all either. :(

This, however, was not my first disappointment. One of the only remaining mainstays of the online menu is the chocolate buffalo ($2.00), which looked and tasted quite good -- it wasn't the best, but it still had good dough, plenty of chocolate filling and even some drizzled on top. The one real drawback was that it was machine-sealed in a plastic bag and it's not exactly clear how long it had been sitting like that. Was it even baked on site, as it didn't exactly resemble anything else in store? It definitely didn't give the greatest impression, in my opinion.

Similarly, there were the cinnamon or chocolate puffs (somewhere around $1.50), which were basically giant rugullah cut in half. I got the cinnamon variety. Again, it tasted pretty good; there was quite a bit of cinnamon filling, which served to moisten the dough and keep it from getting dry. This was a good thing, since it wasn't exactly fresh. :/ Thankfully, the filling did mask it quite a bit and still gave it that chewy yumminess I expected.

Unlike the cinnamon puffs, the raspberry puff twist (something along those lines; $1.50) was a complete disaster. I'm sorry, I don't want to be mean, but I felt cheated and recommend that anyone coming here *not* take anything made of the puff dough. This was, in a word, inedible. Puff pastry dough may not be so time-sensitive as yeast dough, but that doesn't mean it can sit on the shelf for two weeks. This was hard as a rock and, to only it make worse instead of better, there was so little raspberry jam swirled through it that it too hardened and had the consistency of hard candy. It was only possible to cut this with a knife and after toying with it for awhile (and subsequently cutting the top of my mouth), I just gave up. Never again. :(

In the end, this place seemed a bit of a hit and miss. Had it just been the raspberry twist, my rating would have been abysmal, but two solid treats -- although not fresh -- did manage to bump it back up from the lowest possible one. Buyer's discretion is nonetheless recommended.

Rating: **