Nader's Grill and Bakery [RIP]

Bakery: Nader's Middle Eastern Grill and Bakery
Address: 3900 Grand Park Dr, Mississauga ON
Website: http://www.naders.ca/
Style: Middle Eastern
Price: $$$ 

The brothers have a whole bunch of lunch spots throughout the city and Nader's is one of them. Part burger joint, part sit-down restaurant, they also have a "dessert corner" where you can buy baklava, cookies, and less traditional offerings like cakes and ice cream. Despite the sign itself and the "our" bakery on the website description, I'm actually not sure what, if anything, is made by them, since platters along the tops of the counter feature the name of a bakery in Toronto.. or Scarborough (somewhere else, at any rate ^^;;) and they have little else in terms of selection. Comparing them to other places, they don't have so much variety and the baklava is less elaborate, maybe more simple, homemade-looking? However, it also happens to be the second most expensive in the city (Mona takes gold for priciest), with both cookies and baklava at $27/kg.

Still, during their last lunch trip, they came back with two boxes of goodies. Yay! ^_^v Just as a semi-guideline, both boxes together cost around $9. In the first, they picked out some date cookies, tiny little treats made with a hard, crumbly dough and stuffed with a (small) bit of date paste. These were fairly tasty and quite different from the commercial cookies like mammoul  (which are still very good, mind you ;P), both in taste and texture. The opinions were actually divided 50/50 as to what was better: this or the baklava. Me, well, I'm really not so much the honey-and-nuts gal and I do love dates... :3

Secondly was two types of baklava: the layered one, albeit less elaborate than usual, was the traditional one with pistachio (also crushed on top) and the smaller ones were cashew baklava (on the left-hand side), which, for us at any rate, was something new. I can't say I'd ever heard of it elsewhere, so one brother thought these were the highlights of the group, saying it was something different, unique. On the other hand, the other brother claimed they tasted too much like Chinese cashew cookies and the nuts didn't match the baklava. They're quite good (it's hard to do something gross with baklava, isn't it?) though certainly not the best both from what I've had and what's also available in the city.

Rating: **1/2