MALTA BAKE SHOP IN TORONTO BATTLES TO PRESERVE THE PAST.

MALTESE OUTPOST HOLDS OUT

Antoinette Buttigieg is petite, has big brown eyes and, according to her husband, Charlie, the indomitable spirit of a “tiger.” But, on a Saturday morning, not long ago, Antoinette felt more like someone’s prey than a predator. The Buttigiegs own Malta Bake Shop, a momand-pop outfit on Toronto’s Dundas Street West, which they purchased in 1983. The Maltese immigrants serve tasty Maltese fare — cheese-filled pastizzis, pasta-and-meat crammed timpanas, honey rings, piping hot espresso — and more.

Before Charlie and Antoinette took over the shop it was already a bakery and, before that, it had been a Maltese-owned shoe store and, before that, in the 1920s, a Maltese grocery and magnet for Maltese newcomers to Canada; a tiny outpost, far from the ex-pats Mediterranean archipelago, where they socialized, argued over politics, shared news, found work, played bocce and built a community known today as Little Malta.

“The Maltese have been here since the 1920s,” Antoinette says. “This building has a history.”

Meanwhile, the two addresses to the west were once home to a travel agency and a pizza joint, with tenants upstairs, until a developer snapped them up with ambitions of transforming the site into nine new townhouses with rooftop terraces, high efficiency interior lighting, contemporary Italian Lube kitchens, soaker tubs, parking and a million-dollar asking price. The developer also had ambitions for the bake shop.

“He offered us a million dollars for the bakery and a million dollars for the house next door, which we also own — so two million dollars,” Antoinette says.

What can get overlooked, in the ongoing Toronto real estate narrative of skyrocketing home prices, is a city’s disappearing past; about old Macedonian shoe repair guys, Italian barbers, Polish delis and, yes, momand-pop Maltese bakeries, getting pushed out of a gentrifying area. Progress comes and local history goes, and in a big city on a development bender, Malta Bake Shop could have been the next departure.

But a curious thing happened instead: Charlie and Antoinette turned down the two million.

“What are we going to do if we sell, we’re not young — but we’re not old — and this shop has been 40-years of our lives,” Antoinette says. “For me, it is not a job. I feel like the shop is more like our living room and our customers, they are like family. What would we do without our family?”

With that, the Buttigiegs got back to baking.

The couple met in Malta in 1977 — in a cemetery. Antoinette was grieving her dead grandmother and a priest dispatched Charlie to open the cemetery gates. Charlie fumbled with the lock. Antoinette steadied his hand. Three months later they were married.

“I love my wife for so many things,” Charlie says. “We argue, too, but, you know, the older people in Malta, they might not have had much education, but they had all these sayings and her father used to say to me, “If the water doesn’t get rough sometimes — it stinks.”

Charlie and Antoinette raised four children with the bakery as the focal point of family life. Antoinette was baking when she went into labour with their youngest daughter, Ivy, and returned to work a week later. Josef, the eldest, is a stem cell researcher at the University of Regina. He remembers doing his homework at the shop, taking breaks to make pastizzis.

“It is hard to explain, but it was awesome,” he says, adding he was thrilled his parents didn’t sell and, had they wanted to, he would have attempted to rally his three younger siblings — all teachers in Ontario — to try and save the business.

“Do we want to build up condominiums in Toronto? For sure, by all means. But if you start tearing down places with a significant heritage — what do you stand for — do you just forget about the past?

“The Malta Bake Shop — that building is 100-plus years old — and there is a story of a community there.”

Don’t get the wrong the idea: Charlie and Antoinette, both in their early 60s, aren’t just hanging on because of a building’s heritage. They make decent money. Several years ago they started selling frozen boxes of pastizzis to grocery stores around southern Ontario. Frozen sales now represent the bulk of the business.

But the bakery persists as a physical-draw for the Maltese. Both as an emblem of the past — the interior decor features maps and photos of Malta, a shrine to the island’s patron saint, red and white tables and chairs (the Maltese flag is red and white) — and a gathering place in the present for aging Maltese men and women, who chatter away in their native tongue over coffee and pastizzis. Marie-louise Coleiro Preca, the president of Malta, popped by in April, as will every Maltese dignitary passing through Toronto, since they all understand Maltese life, in Canada, started here.

And, for now, the little bakery in Little Malta isn’t going anywhere despite the construction project looming next door.

“I have two herniated discs, so I do have some pain,” Charlie says. “But for us to close the shop, it would be like losing one of our children."

PHOTOS: TYLER ANDERSON / NATIONAL POST Paul Tanti has long been a patron of Toronto’s Malta Bake, a traditional gathering spot for the city’s Maltese community over the past decades.

A new condominium is being built beside the Malta Bake Shop in Toronto’s Junction area but bakery owners Charlie, left, and Antoinette Buttigieg refused to sell their property to the developer and continue to work in the kitchen as they have for 40 years, calling the shop a “living room” and their customers “family.”