A small kitchen with very high standards.
The eleven-year journey from one stubborn baker to one of Toronto's most loved patisseries.
Betty Lavoie didn't plan to open a bakery. She had a CFA, a corner desk on Bay Street, and a job that was going perfectly fine. She also had Sunday mornings, which she spent baking.
In 2013, she walked into a tiny patisserie in Lyon for a six-week stage that turned into seven months. She came home, drew up a one-page business plan on the back of a Porter Airlines napkin, and signed a lease on a six-seat space at 812 Queen Street West. The first morning we opened — March 4, 2014 — we sold out by noon and had to apologise to forty people.
Eleven years later, we still cream the butter by hand. The kitchen is bigger, the team is twelve strong, and we have an actual website. But the philosophy is the same.
What we believe
The ingredient is the recipe
Most pastry mistakes are really shopping mistakes. We use AOP-certified butter from Charente, organic flour milled within 200 km of Toronto, eggs from a small farm in Stouffville, and chocolate from Valrhona and Original Beans. Nothing else does the job.
Made the day you eat it
Pastry is fragile. It does not survive a freezer. Every croissant, every macaron, every slice of cake we sell was made within the last 16 hours. If it doesn't sell that day, it goes to The Stop community food centre — never the bin.
Small menu, made well
We bake about a dozen things at any one time. We could bake forty. We choose not to. A short menu means we get to obsess over every item — the temperature of the butter, the hydration of the dough, the angle of the piping nozzle.
People over profits
Our team is paid above the Toronto living wage. Our suppliers are paid on time, every time. Our cake consults are 30 minutes long, and we don't upsell. If we can't make what you want better than someone else can, we'll send you to them.
The team
Twelve people. Three trained at Le Cordon Bleu. Two are former engineers who decided yeast was more interesting than spreadsheets. All of us care, painfully, about getting the small things right.
What's next
We're slowly working on a small cookbook for 2027 — a collection of the recipes we've taught at our Saturday workshops over the years. Sign up to the newsletter at the bottom of any page if you'd like to hear about it first.