Giving us a daily offering
Mia Stainsby
Sun
T Room Bakery owner Isabel Li (left) with princess cake and Patricia Gahr with pumpkin squash soup and sandwich with bacon, brie, avocado and tomato on sourdough bread. Photograph by : Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
It’s got style and it’s got grace. From the chaste white room with twinkling crystal chandeliers to the pretty pastries arrayed in a neat display; from the toothsome savouries to the polite and helpful staff, T Room Bakery and Kitchenware is a charmer.
Half of the room is bakery/cafe and the other half is a kitchen store with affordable cooking tools and cookware. In warmer times of the year, it’s really worth walking to the back of the room and out the door to the designer patio.
The woman behind it is Isabel Li, a Taiwanese woman who came to Canada by way of Brazil and it shows in her accent. It also explains why amid the variety of baking and pastries, you’ll find pao de queijo, a Brazilian bread made with cassava flour.
She and her sister once ran a local business making custom cakes until it got to be too much. Li decided to continue her passion and went to the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts, although instructors wondered if she needed the training.
She’s always changing her offerings so you can’t describe her menu of selections; leading up to Halloween, there were lots of seasonal items as well as lavender shortbread, matcha cookies, biscotti, a version of Thomas Haas’ chocolate sparkle cookies and French pastries. Her half-spherical jiggly gelatin moulds are lovely.
Earlier, she had a champagne jelly with berries; more recently, it’s a Seville orange marmalade jelly with Grand Marnier. It’s a great way to have your French pastry and eat it too, without the butter, cream or even wheat.
She has about half a dozen panini, a couple of salads and soups daily. They, too, change. The chicken salad panini sold me on the sandwich front — moist, chunky marinated chicken breast with hits of cumin, celery, marinated cucumber, pine nuts and a flavoured mayo. The pastries, while not up to the exquisite standards of Ganache in Yaletown or Thomas Haas in North Van, are quite lovely.
Her sandwiches are $6.95 and French pastries are about $4 to $5.
There are some 60 different teas and if you want to splurge and do a girly afternoon tea, call ahead for a 2 p.m. or 4 p.m. seating. It costs $26 and $16 for the “Teeny” isn’t tinier, it’s just kid-friendly.
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T ROOM BAKERY
4445 10th Ave., 604-677-2579.
Open 7 days week, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
