Crown Pastries

Crown Pastries sells its sweets the way a pastry house in Aleppo would — by weight, by the kilogram, arranged into assortments and boxed to be carried somewhere. You do not really come here for a single baklawa; you come for a tray of them, or a mixed box to set out for guests. The Oakville shop, run by Rasoul and Ismail Salha, deals in Syrian pastry by the tin and the assortment: baklawa and kunafa, maamoul and borma, the handcrafted Middle Eastern sweets the family carried with it out of Aleppo.

Baklawa alone comes in several registers. Pistachio plays against walnut; there is the flakier Turkish square, assabeh rolled around almonds or pistachios, and borma — shredded pastry wound tight around whole green nuts. Kunafa appears in two forms: the traditional Kunafa with Bun, and a Dubai chocolate kunafa bar that folds a current dessert craze into a much older technique. Balaurieh, faisalye, and chocolate mafroukeh with mixed nuts fill out the syrup-and-nut end of the case, each a slightly different answer to the same short list of ingredients — pastry, nuts, sugar, and time.

Past the baklawa, the counter widens. Maamoul pressed with pistachios or dates, warbat layered with ashta, esh asfour, basbousa, sweet cheese pastry, and barazek studded with sesame sit alongside pistachio fingers arranged by the tray. Pistachio runs through much of the case — in the baklawa, the fingers, the cream sold by the tub — the shop's default note of luxury. The cake side turns contemporary, with ashta oreo, ferraro rocher, and red velvet for the customer who came in for a birthday rather than a box of baklawa. There are bulk formats, too: pistachio cream and slabs of chocolate sold by the kilo, ordered for a crowd rather than an afternoon.

The breadth reads as confidence in one tradition rather than a scattered display. The nut-forward baklawa and ashta-filled pastries are the core; the chocolate bars and Western-style cakes extend the offering without displacing the Aleppo repertoire. Much of the case is made by hand and meant to move fresh, which is part of why the shop leans so hard on assortments and gifting. Sweets are packed into tin boxes, built into mixed boxes, and wrapped to be handed to someone — the habits of a bakery that expects its work to leave in quantity, for a table or a holiday, not to be eaten standing at the door.

The story behind it is a family one. Rasoul and Ismail Salha trace their pastry craft to Aleppo, where the recipes were handed down through a grandfather, and the family carried that heritage to the Toronto area in 2015. Pastry at this level is exacting work — layered dough, clarified butter, syrup timed to the minute — and that hand technique is what the family treats as its inheritance. What they make has stayed consistent as the business has grown — baklawa, kunafa, and handcrafted Middle Eastern sweets, made the way the family learned to make them. The Oakville shop opened in 2023, one branch of a business that had reached eight Ontario locations by 2025.

How people use Crown Pastries follows from all of this. The shop keeps long hours, open every day into the late evening, and builds much of its trade around assortments, gift packaging, and custom cakes booked ahead for an occasion. Assorted boxes and petit fours are built to order, and on a given evening the same box might be a host gift, a holiday tray, or the sweet end of an ordinary weeknight. Its reach runs well past the storefront, too: orders placed online ship across Canada and into the United States, so a box assembled in Oakville can be on a table several provinces away by the end of the week.