Not Like Nilus

I couldn’t help but lament to Joey about our city’s saturated cafe market. It seems lately no matter where we find ourselves, there’s one on every corner, staring us brazenly in the face, knowing they can strong arm any spot their owners feel like paying for. Day by day, I feel myself urged more and more to crowd multiple pastry shops, bakeries, or cafeterias into one review, feeling that their differences don’t really matter. If the height of my grief seems too aweless, likening the café as the English student of the restaurant world might be offensive enough to make you understand. I won’t say that when someone’s at a culinary impasse they decide to open a café; but again, it sure does seem like there’re a lot of cafes with nothing spectacularly different about them.
 

My grief was at its height when Debrodnik’s Real Bake Company seemed like any other place. Another bakery or café in another plaza, bombed with illustrations on its windows advertising fresh sandwiches and what not. It too even holds up a little part of the aesthetic bargain. You can believe there’s a wall to sit against festooned with the fanciest decorative floral print wallpaper. You all know the next word I’m going to utter too: rococo. Luckily, it’s reserved to a single space. Beyond that is a more humble area with no spectacular colour schemes, just sandwich tables, pastry fridges, and playfully framed wall illustrations. Beyond that though, a spectacularly playful and spunky menu of simple, yet very creative sandwiches which, in hindsight, were carefully considered and work. How could a poutine sandwich not have been? Or a mini quiche in a bagel? If you’re reading this with any kind of my usual acrimony, please don’t, because Debrodnik’s is a fantastic change of pace. With meatball sandwiches, deep fried cinnamon buns, and proverbial black and white cookies, Debrodnik’s brings us workable comfort food, junk food, and good food. Yes, there are also fresh deli sandwiches. It’s an eight item menu, and I hope it never grows. It doesn’t have to, especially when it’s matched with some of the most creative pastries I’ve seen in a while.

Joey and I mowed down on a meatball sandwich and a gut busting poutine packed in a Kaiser, aptly named, ‘the Gut Buster.’ Weighing in at over one pound, a chewy Kaiser with an immaterial doughnut like sweetness was stuffed with fries, cheese curds, and more fries. Then, topped with gravy, it was carefully pressed together, ensuring its cheesy scaffolding would hold. And before you think something so carbo-loaded couldn’t work, guess again. Crispy fries, cheese curds that actually melted (in a poutine, heaven forbid), and spicy gravy matched the texture of a Kaiser that was buoyant and without all that flakiness we are always sadly expecting. Not here, however. Debrodnik’s creates a novelty sandwich that won’t be novelty for long; it’ll be Canon. 

Our Meatball sandwich was a close second. Crammed with roasted red peppers, mozzarella cheese, parmesan, tomato sauce, and a meatball the size of a little girl’s fist, we couldn’t believe it stayed together, but the sandwich’s creator knew a thing or two about balance.

And if we weren’t comatose enough, we made sure we would be by the time we left, finishing our visit off with a raspberry mocha slice- a cake stacked with rich raspberry mouse, cake, mocha mousse, and a brownie like bottom. A little rich for our fat selves, with a mousse a little more jellied than we would have liked, but a creative ensemble nonetheless. Next was the choux pastry baked black and white cookie topped with, what else? Black and white frosting. Cake like, but with body, it reminded me of so many of the pastries my grandmother shoves in my face. But the deep fried cinnamon bun was the favourite of the bunch. With a crispy exterior cased around a soft chewy inner bread laden with cinnamon and sugar, and coated with a thick heavy frosting we had to stop and put it down, think of how good it was, and pick up where we left off.

Debrodnik’s is the kind of stuff we dream about, see on TV, hear about on cosmopolitan food trucks, but anchored in a locale we can always come to visit. A place I’m wishing I kept a secret, what with its inexpensive and great food. Food, as far as I’m concerned, that easily shames every other blazeh bakery around.

Debrodnik’s Fresh Bake Company

(519) 888-8378

220 King St North  
Waterloo, ON 
N2J2Y7

MON-SAT: 11-7

ANY PAYMENT

Tweet

One Restaurant at a Time

271 West passes pasta test

I'd post the review here, but it belongs to the Record. So click the link for the full review! Enjoy!

 -w 

Tweet

I Can Remember It For You Wholesale

Thank goodness for Joey, because I know nothing about anything shawarma. Though the Levantine ritual of packing meat in a wrap and selling it in as many competing hasheries in Waterloo as possible has existed for as long as any Canadian Chinese food place has, I’ve never taken the time to go in, order, and see what the buzz is all about, largely in part because I could never come to terms with the price for something so simple. That said, the only perspective afforded me in regards to the shawarma, the falafel, or the gyro, all came in retrospect to what the shacks in the University of Waterloo’s campus court plaza’s bodega of culinary delight has to offer. Joey too has his own understanding. His understanding being that Australia has the best gyros, shawarmas, ‘whatevers,’ he has ever eaten. And who am I to deny it? I know nothing of the sort.

Highland Halal Shawarma had us both hankering curiously for whatever it was that drew people into its small corner. Aside from our usual sniggering at anything food and anything attention grabbing, we figured the traffic must have been some indication that Highland Halal Shawarma was doing something right.

Its menu’s small, its food inexpensive. No meal will run you over 10 dollars. And if you deny yourself the option of a combo and stick to the puritan disposition of its wraps, you’ll have a bite that’s even cheaper, but just as satisfying. Before I took a bite this was my favourite thing about Halal Shawarma; before its tiny space, before its two stool bar on-looking a parking lot crossed out by iron, before its mirrored walls that make an infinitely small space look on, humorously, into infinity. But I’m not complaining; I liked it. I liked the white noise, the bright lights. It was a space that stirred in me all the fantasy of food joints in big cities. When I went in, I could pretend that when I went out something big and urban was waiting, steam rising from sewers, people smashing elbows- not sprawl and neglected suburbs, not strip malls. Just me, Joey, and whatever shawarma was. Whatever cheap shawarma was.

Joey was first up; he knew what he wanted. All the fixings on the side, cautioning me that he fills his own pita because some people really load up his wraps; that, for whatever reason, doesn’t sit right with him. I was indifferent. And, of course, lacking any perspective I ordered a falafel wrap (5.30) and a shawarma wrap (6.64), as well as the novel, yet not for faint-of-heart, Ayran than-koto yogurt drink, making sure Joey got one too.

 

Lobbed in front of me and cuddled in a paper bag were two separate wraps, each in two even smaller paper bags. In each, warm pitas cocooned snuggly around respective fillings of fried chickpea patties and chicken- shaved from a conical spit. Any other fixings were up to the eater; they could include brightly pickled turnips, radishes, pickles, and the lesser more mundane everyday vegetables.

My resilient, chewy pita counterpoised the chaotic stuffing of crispy chickpea falafels, slippery pickles, and spicy lip puckering hot sauce. It was a fun thing to chew, and a great way to manage fillings that have a potential for making a big mess, especially when a falafel as perfectly crisp as mine gave way to a soft sumptuous cumin centre. My tender shawarma was no different. Its tender meat, a savoury hot roast against cooling pickles pulled up again by a humming hot sauce was a great first experience. Our tart yogurt drinks too. We both wondered if they tasted as sour as each other’s. They did. We laughed. We loved it. Sour and savoury quenched with even more sour and savoury. Staring out into the parking lot, it was a good way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon.

HIGHLAND HALAL SHAWARMA

(519) 741-8300

200 Highland Rd. W.

Kitchener, ON N2M 3C2

Tue-Sun 11 am - 9 pm

ANY PAYMENT

Tweet