Three Tarts

Three Tarts answers one question cleanly: where to find the cake or the tart a celebration is built around, from a bakeshop that never asks you to sit down to a meal to get it. It works on Bank Street in downtown Ottawa, between Centretown and the Glebe, in three modes — a walk-in dessert counter open Wednesday through Sunday afternoons, whole cakes and tarts ordered a day ahead, and next-day local delivery for when the dessert has to travel on its own. The pastry is hand-rolled, the fruit is seasonal, and the case runs deep — pies, cakes, cookies, and the tarts the shop takes its name from — deep enough that a table can plan an occasion around it without the day ever turning formal.

The clearest statement of what the bakery does is the White Chocolate, Cranberry & Toasted Pistachio Tart — dried cranberries and toasted pistachios set under white chocolate ganache, sweet and tart at once, built large enough to serve six and offered Friday through Sunday. The Strawberry Rhubarb Tart is its seasonal counterpart, summer strawberries and rhubarb baked into vanilla bean butter custard. For a chocolate centrepiece there is the French Chocolate Mousse Cake: flourless chocolate sponge layered with dark mousse, finished in ganache and a touch of gold leaf, made without gluten. The Coconut Cream Pie holds down the homier end, coconut custard in sweet dough under whipped cream and toasted coconut. Not all of it is sweet — the savoury tarts run quiche-style, ham with aged Welsh Cheddar, or Yukon Gold potato and sautéed leeks in an all-butter pâte brisée.

Underneath the signatures sits the everyday range that keeps a neighbourhood bakery busy. Aidan's Chocolate Cake is plain on purpose — a moist chocolate cake the shop suggests pairing with cold milk and nothing else. Strawberry shortcake turns up among the counter favourites in season. There are raisin butter tarts, pecan squares, Hungarian rhubarb shortbread, and assorted cookies in ginger snap, peanut butter, double chocolate, and a mocha cinnamon chocolate chip, plus scones and banana bread for the counter crowd. None of it chases novelty; the classics are the point, made well. A local touch even turns up in the freezer, where The Merry Dairy's vanilla ice cream comes swirled with lemon curd.

The thing that separates the case from a supermarket bakery is handwork. Pastry is rolled by hand. Lemons are zested and juiced in the shop rather than poured from a bottle, which is what keeps the lemon tart and the lemon cloud cake tasting of fruit instead of candy. Neither the signature tart nor the rhubarb one reinvents anything; they take formats everyone already knows and get the proportions exactly right. Summer fruit comes through Parkdale Market, close enough that the strawberry rhubarb tart shifts with whatever the season is doing. The discipline has held a long time: the bakeshop opened downtown in December 1996, and its working posture has not moved since — keep the original recipes while quietly learning new ones. Three decades of that buys a particular reliability. The cake ordered for this year's birthday is recognizably the one from last.

That reliability is most of what Three Tarts sells. Pickup and delivery both run on a plan-ahead rhythm — orders in at least a day before, the practical cutoff four in the afternoon — which makes the bakery less an impulse stop than a standing arrangement for the sweet end of an occasion. Some items, the almond cakes and a few of the tarts, are pre-order only, so the planning is built into the menu itself. Walk-ins still get the counter Wednesday through Sunday, for the afternoons that call for a single tart and nothing more. For a birthday on Bank Street, or anywhere a box can reach the next day, it is the order you place once and then stop thinking about.