This Avondale store is a bit bananas
True story: I was running late for a cardiologist’s appointment when my stomach decided to make me even later.
It was empty and demanding attention, which I happily obliged. After all, taking another few minutes to grab a bite meant delaying the usual onset of white coat syndrome I felt every time I set foot in my doc’s office.
So I stopped at the Avondale Food Store near his practice. I knew it broke food writer Michael Pollan’s cardinal rule of never eating at corner stores or places where you fuel your car — a guideline I also try to follow. But a rumbling stomach and that looming bout of white coat syndrome can make a person do the inexplicable.
Lucky for me, the Avondale in question was operated by Osvaldo (Ozzie) Mucciarelli, his wife Bernadine and his sister-in-law Anna Santo. As soon as I walked into their north St. Catharines store, I was walloped with the blood pressurelowering smell of fresh baking.
Sweet banana, cinnamon, and warm sugar filled my lungs with nary a hint of stale coffee, recycled air and spoiled milk I’ve sniffed in other convenience stores I’ve frequented.
A glass case lined with still-warm loaves of banana, apple, morning glory and cranberry bread took up prime real estate at one end of the front counter. At the other, the industrial oven from which they emerged moments earlier. Cinnamon rolls and Saran-wrapped slices of their quick breads filled the empty spaces alongside product displays in between.
I breathed deeply, grabbed a cinnamon roll and made my way to my appointment. Michael Pollan, I figured, missed this place in his rule-affirming research.
In keeping with the day’s theme, I also ignored my cardiologist’s rule of not eating in his office as I noshed on that cinnamon roll and thought non-whitecoat thoughts.
What transpired next may very well have been a medical miracle. My doctor recorded one of my most normal blood pressure readings I’d seen in ages.
Who knows why, but for the sake of this story, I’m crediting the aromatherapy I experienced a few minutes earlier, and the carb-loaded comfort provided by that frosted cinnamon roll from an Avondale unlike any other in Niagara.
Turns out, what smells like banana bread to one person, smells like opportunity to another.
“This is where the money is — in baking,” Ozzie told me during a recent visit to get the scoop on his convenience store-slash-bakery. “You can’t make any money on milk. You can’t make any money on cigarettes.”
You also can’t make money on rotten bananas, which is what propelled the Mucciarellis and Santo from mere convenience store operators to purveyors of banana bread that Garden City northenders swear by.
Turn back the clock 20 years, and Ozzie was faced with a bunch of bananas that had seen better days.
He asked Bernadine to do something with them.
“She said, ‘I’m going to make
‘‘ She said ‘My son said all he wants for Christmas is your banana bread.
OZZIE MUCCIARELLI AVONDALE OPERATOR
banana bread,’” Ozzie, 78, said. “People loved it. She had the right recipe.”
At first, Bernadine gave away the goods to neighbours. Ozzie had a better idea. That banana bread could pad those milk and cigarette sales. Soon enough, it was padding them so much, Ozzie had to don an apron to help his wife keep up with demand.
Twenty loaves a day swelled to 56, and their repertoire grew to include other flavours.
“The loaves, the chunky apple, the banana, the lemon seed — pretty soon it’ll be peach season. She does peach (bread), too. We do them all,” he said.
But none are as beloved as the banana, which sells for $5.29, and is the stuff of dreams or Christmas wish lists, as the case may be.
“One time we had a lady come in around Christmas time. She said ‘My son said all he wants for Christmas is your banana bread,’” Ozzie recalled.
Beyond using “nice and brown” bananas, neither would divulge what makes it so special. They won’t even tell the higherups at Avondale, who’ve asked for the recipe.
The only downside to their side hustle is the early hours, Bernadine noted. Some days, that means showing up at the store at 6 a.m. to turn on the ovens.
The couple mix the batter ahead of time, freezing it until they need it. They scoop it into loaf pans the night before baking to make mornings a little less cruel.
Other treats, like those healing cinnamon rolls, are made from dough they purchase raw and bake in store.
Their baking abilities have made their store a destination. They also made Ozzie Avondale’s manager of the year last year.
Such accolades are a point of pride as much as the secret recipe itself.
“I wish I could bottle it and just sell the smell,” Ozzie said, breathing in another day’s work. “When you hear people say they love it, that makes me feel good. I wish we would have (started baking) sooner.”