Old Bread Mill [RIP]

Bakery: Old Bread Mill
Address: 14 Oxford St, Richmond Hill ON 
Website: n/a
Style: Italian 
Price: $$-$$$

Another trip to Richmond Hill (for cake), another Cake Tour. :) This seems to have become the general rule and I'm not complaining. Not in the mood for navigating parking-less plaza to get another Persian bakery on the list (though in retrospect I probably should have), I turned into this more easily navigable bakery off of Yonge (south of Elgin Mills).

As with countless Italian "bakeries", this is most certainly a deli first and the smell that greets you is not of freshly baked bread or baked goods (though that in itself is quite the rarity), but of pizza. Notwithstanding that ubiquitous hot table and cold-cut counter, they have one corner devoted to breads and two cases to pastries up at the front. Italian bakeries seem to fall into a general price range and Old Bread Mill falls into this category, with pastries on the board advertised as being $1.75 (this clearly does not apply to all pastries, however, but no indication of that is made). Then enter the other offerings. Their cream-filled doughnuts look great, but $2 for a simple, sugar-dusted doughnut seems a little steep. As does $9 or something for the strudel.

The bakery, however, does make up for it with some pretty darn good pastries. The first was, of course, the good old-fashioned cannolo ($1.75), available in either original and chocolate flavours. It's really getting hard to differentiate from one to the other, especially after so many, but this certainly figured in the "better" group. Nice shell, good filling. Perhaps it's not award-winning (Woodbridge, it seems, reigns supreme), but very good nonetheless.

The second item was the slice of baklava ($2.49). Alright, so I wasn't the only one to exclaim a little dubiously that baklava is certainly not Italian; it was the first thing that came out of sampler #3's mouth, but all in all, it was a pleasant surprise (going with the assumption that Italian baklava can't be the best) to find that this was, like the cannolo, pretty good! A larger slice with your typical soaked filo and a generous nut filling -- the Old Bread Mill does not disappoint!

Rating: ***