Arz Fine Foods

I first heard about Arz Fine Foods on the TV Show "Street Eats", which hilights a different cuisine each week; Arz Fine Foods was on their Lebanese episode. They focused mainly on their bakery, and their tasty baklava and mamoul. Doing a little googling, I realized that their store was quite close to my place of work, I could go a little out of my way to drop by after work. Located at 1909 Lawrence Street East (east of Pharmancy). My first attempt to find the store failed, I thought it was on Ellesmere, so I was happy to find it the second time. The store is standalone, with parking at the side and back.

This is a fairly large store, with a quite large section for fruits and vegetables just within. Next to this are sections for meats, cheeses and prepared goods, dairy products, frozen goods, dried and packaged goods, and a quite large bakery. I was struck as to how clean the store is.

Arz sells its own freshly baked pitas, both in whole wheat and white. Quite good.

The falafels they sell are quite tasty.

To go with the falafels, have some hummous. Quite tasty.

The tabbouleh I found to be very soggy, and not quite so tasty.

These grape leaves are stuffed with vegetables, you can also get ones with beef. Tasty, but quite lemony.

This is a stuffed zucchini, with vegetables, you can also get ones with beef.

The baklava are quite delicious, made with walnuts or cashews or pistachios. Yum!

Even better were the mamoul. These were also made with either walnut, pistachio or date. The pistachio and date (the most traditional) were my favourite.

Bakery Review - Panera Bread

The other week I noticed a new sign near the Walmart at Square One, a section of the land next to the mall is filling up with some new restaurants and stores (Boston Pizza, Running Room, Spence Diamonds), this one said Panera Bread. Intrigued, I pointed it out to my beautiful Bride, who also expressed interest, then we both promptly forgot about. That is, until about two weeks later, when we, again, saw the sign, this time we thought to finally check it (I guess we were hungrier then). We weren't disappointed, at least initially.

Panera Bread is an American-based chain of what might be called "fast casual" food; each franchise is a bakery-café, serving breads, baked goods, soups, sandwiches, coffee and drinks, plus more.

We initially tried their wild blueberry scone (as you can see in the picture), which we liked very much and have since bought again, and again, and a loaf of multi-grain bread. The bread was okay, and we did experience an issue with it, that was promptly rectified (so kudos for their customer service!).

We have not tried any of their soup (they feature about nine kinds of soup, you can have them in sourdough bread bowls) or sandwiches, only their baked goods. We always seem to arrive too late for their orange scone, which my beautiful Bride wants to sample. We did not like their sunflower bread, made from white whole wheat, it was way too soft inside, but that's likely to be a problem with the less gluten content of the white whole wheat. We did like their honey whole wheat bread, quite tasty, and a good sandwich bread.

Overall, we like it enough to go back again, it is a little expensive for some of their products (not unlike StarBucks), and we want to try eating there one day.

Golden Hearth Baking

I discovered this bakery, located kitty-corner across the road from the Farmer's Market in Kitchener, in my Internet Travels, it is called Golden Hearth Baking. Being in town one afternoon, we thought we'd check it out.

This is a small location, with ovens in the back, and when we arrived I think most of their baked goods were already gone, at least their breads, we arrived about 1 in the afternoon, though they offer their breads for sale in a number of locations in Kitchener and Waterloo, check their website above to find a location near you. There were a number of other healthy products for sale as well, one thing we did purchase here was the hummus that I wrote about before. Too bad that they didn't have much bread for sale, I would have liked to try some, but we did pick some sweet baked goods to sample.

This is a dark chocolate with walnuts square that we bought, it tasted great.

This is an almond biscotti that we bought, it tasted good, but not as good as the dark chocolate walnut square.