Cheap Eat of the Week: Keriwa Cafe’s basket of pastries
By Gizelle Lau
The pastry basket at Keriwa Cafe (Image: Gizelle Lau)
Keriwa Cafe has been on my brunch radar since the popular Queen West spot started offering it back in November 2011.
So, on a recent snowy morning, I packed some friends into the car and headed to the comforting warmth of Keriwa’s dark wooden tables. A hug-sized mug of coffee warms the fingers, but what really gets brunch off on the right foot is Keriwa’s wallet-friendly basket of pastries ($10). It’s perfectly sized to share with your fellow brunching companions, and will immediately confer upon you that priceless Saturday morning feeling.
Keriwa’s ever-changing basket of pastries boasts homemade muffins, croissants, scones and — if you’re lucky — cookies. They’re all packed with Keriwa’s aboriginal-Canadian and local flavours, and made with the kitchen’s roster of unusual ingredients, like red fife (a type of wheat). When we visited, the selection was a lemon blackcurrant scone, a sultana buckwheat flower muffin, red fife croissants and a couple of bite-sized ginger snap cookies.
Served from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekends only, the brunch at Keriwa offers some dishes similar to those on the dinner menu, like pork belly ($15) or smoked whitefish ($14), but brightened up and lightened for a brunch crowd. Of course, there are also the obligatory egg dishes, like a brown-butter eggs Benedict with homemade bacon on a crumbly red-fife biscuit ($15).
Keriwa Cafe, 1690 Queen St. W., 416-533-2552
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