Toronto’s go-to place for Persian sweets
Red Rose Patisserie has been serving up delicious cakes and cookies since the early 1990s
Inside the long-standing Red Rose Patisserie, co-owner Fariba Eskandari instinctively hands over samples of the bakery’s vanilla roulade cake from behind the counter as customers try to narrow down which of the pistachio dusted and jam-filled cookies to take home.
“If they don’t try it, how will they know?” her brother Reza later tells me over the phone.
“It’s what we learned from our parents. Before COVID, my father would go around and tell customers to try the nuts and cookies. He always had a tray of cookies in front of the cash. Sometimes people are hesitant to try it if they don’t taste it first.”
The Red Rose Patisserie has been a cornerstone along Toronto’s Little Persia strip since its first location opened near the Yonge-Finch intersection in 1993.
The current location, also on the Yonge strip but just south of Steeles, opened in 2000. The original location closed in 2010, merging the two bakeries into one.
The bakery’s initial opening came at a crucial time as during the late ’80s and ’90s thousands of Iranians immigrated to Canada.
As more Iranian-owned businesses slowly opened up beside each other, a Persian culinary destination just south of Thornhill was established.
The cafe and pastry shop served as an unofficial community hub.
“We tried to create an atmosphere like back home,” said Reza.
“We play Persian music and people will feel like they’re home. If they miss back home, they come to Red Rose, have some Persian tea and music. Especially back at a time when we didn’t have much of a community.”
At Red Rose, the shop has cases full of shirini tar (fresh cream-filled pastries like Swiss rolls and mocha cakes), shirini khoshk (dry sweets such as cookies), and pistachio, saffron and rosewater ice creams.
There’s also zulbia, golden fried desserts covered in rosewater and honey syrup (its Indian counterpart, the jalebi, is believed to originate from zulbia centuries ago).
In the lead-up to Nowruz, the bakery will crank out more specialty cookies such as nan-e berenji, a delicate cardamom and rosewater-flavoured rice-flour cookie.
There’s also nan-e nokhodchi: tiny melt-in-your-mouth flowershaped cookies made of double roasted ground chickpeas (they’re eaten for the New Year, but the bakery makes them year-round).
While the bakery has been a mainstay in its current location for more than 20 years, it will likely have to relocate.
A planning notice for a proposed 25-storey mixed-use residential building has gone up in the plaza’s parking lot.
“We’re looking for another location, probably in Richmond Hill or anywhere close by, in a couple of years,” Reza said.
“It’s hard to open up a new store and transfer all the equipment, but the thing that keeps us going is the appreciation from the people,” he said.
“When they say our cookies are good, it makes us want to try better and make a better product. That was our mission from the first day we started this business.”