Brick Street Bakery

A bakery is supposed to lead with its pastry case. Brick Street Bakery leads with a Christmas dinner you can hold in one hand — the Boxing Day Sandwich — sold on an ordinary Tuesday in the Distillery District. The savoury board is the centre of gravity here, and it pulls the whole operation closer to a portable lunch counter than to a pastry stop.

That board runs from breakfast well into lunch, cold sandwiches and hot ones on the same page. Piggy's Cluck stacks bacon and eggs with lettuce, tomato, cheese and mayonnaise, the clearest morning order of the lot. Coronation chicken is the most distinctly British of the group: roast chicken bound with apricots, apples, raisins and a curry mango sauce, sweet and savoury at once and heavier than any chicken-salad filling. The hot pulled pork brings southern barbecue sauce, lettuce, carrots and mayonnaise for a lunch built to be substantial, while a roasted vegetable sandwich, a lamb kofta wrap and a bowl of turkey chili widen things past the meat-and-bread core.

What ties the savoury side together is a British baking sensibility — comfort food made to be picked up and carried, not plated and lingered over. The Boxing Day Sandwich is its sharpest expression, a full holiday dinner of turkey, stuffing and cranberry rebuilt as a sandwich you can order in July. Sausage rolls and Cornish pasties come from the same instinct: the hand pie and the meat pastry made to hold a filling and travel, a Bakewell and Eccles-cake lineage that predates any Toronto counter by a couple of centuries. Set the butter tart and the Nanaimo bar beside all of it, and the case reads as two baking cultures sharing a shelf — the Old World savoury pastry and the Canadian sweet, neither deferring to the other. It is a specific point of view for a bakery to hold, and it holds it without announcing it.

The sweet case holds its own weight: Portuguese custard tarts, almond croissants, double chocolate tarts, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, scones and cinnamon buns, with breads baked for carrying home. That range is the practical point. One compact counter covers a bacon-and-egg breakfast, a full sandwich lunch and a bag of baking for later, which is more than a pastry-only shop asks of its morning line. A stop can begin as breakfast, become lunch, and still send a guest out with a loaf under one arm. For some the loaves are the real errand, a bakery run folded into the grocery one.

Brick Street has kept its place on Trinity Street since 2002, which makes it one of the longer-running tenants in a former Victorian distillery complex now given over to galleries, patios and pedestrian traffic. The cobblestone lanes fill and empty through the day, and a bakery counter suits that rhythm: order, pay, keep moving, a meal fitted around whatever else the visit holds. The model is takeaway and delivery rather than a seated service, the seating compact and the line quick. The board itself has changed little across that run; it did not need to. That steadiness has made the bakery a fixed point while the destination around it turned over more than once.

So the order comes in pairs: a savoury to anchor the meal, a sweet to close it. A Coronation chicken sandwich and a butter tart; a sausage roll and a Nanaimo bar; a Piggy's Cluck eaten on a bench somewhere past the galleries. The British savouries and the Canadian sweets do different jobs in the same paper bag, and the bakery has been handing that mixed bag back into the Distillery since long before most of its neighbours opened.