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| - It has been a bagelful weekend.
After a successful brunch at United Bakers, we decided to get a fix closer to home, at the Kivas at Yonge and St. Clair.
This location opened last fall to great excitement among the Forest Hill crowd, many of whom remember trekking northward to the perpetually run-down bakery at Bathurst and Steeles.
The Yonge and St. Clair Kivas fronts it's retail credibility. A sales counter holds refrigerated items like pre-packed cream cheese, tuna and egg salads, sodas and cloudy apple juice from Israel. They are joined by sweet baked goods, fine rugalach (which make a free appearance after the meal), and chocolate buffalo, which is basically a sweet, bready dough wrapped around insanely fudgy chocolate, and worth taking out on its own.
The place is clearly geared towards take-out. People pop by for the bagel-cream-cheese-lox fix. However, at the back there is a sleek dining room with comfy benches and chairs, funky wainscoting on the walls (I haven't used the word 'wainscoting' since a Monty Python bender a few years ago), and modern light fixtures. The bathrooms reflect the trend towards unisex WCs, and shared sinks outside designed to shame everyone into hand washing compliance. Unlike uptown, they are clean.
From a dining perspective, there are two Kivas. Bagels are unapologetically Toronto-centric. Dense, crusty-chewy rolls showered with poppy or sesame seeds. Pumpernickel and marble flavors offend traditionalists mildly. Whole wheat and other atrocities are rightfully ignored. Bring home a dozen, with appropriate salads and toppings, and maybe a dessert or ten, and you've got the makings of a fine Sunday brunch.
Eat in, and you're asking for trouble.
Greek salad is a mound of fresh vegetables dusted with feta and not-greek-but-welcome-anyway eggs hard boiled to creaminess, olive-oil based dressing on the side. Chicken soup is a damning failure. A crock arrives, dominated by a single softball-sized and textured matzo ball. Chopped carrot and onion take up a good portion of the vessel. They've been added after the fact, and aren't properly cooked out. Weirdest of all, the soup is sour. We can't decide if it's from all the onion juice, or if someone threw a lemon or vinegar into the batch. Nobody gets sick, so we don't think the broth has spoilt. If a Kiva's representative would like to explain, I'd love to hear it. It's not my taste, but I'm curious whether it's a different cultural approach, or just lousy soup.
Breakfast is most successful. A plate of lox, eggs and onions features slivers of fish and well-caramelized onions, with tomato and cucumber garnish, and a glorious toasted bagel dripping with butter.
Coffee is stale and grey, initially served in a glass mug that highlights its stale-greyness (I hate glass mugs). When transferred to ceramic, it holds heat better, and if you get a pot immediately, it's OK.
Service is frustrating. Three people work the counter and restaurant simultaneously, so nothing gets done. Orders are mixed up despite fewer than five occupied tables. A tuna melt arrives as an ice-cold tuna congealed. It is grudgingly re-warmed. One one occasion, it arrives hot, but we are told that because we're late, there's no soup or salad to round out the $9.99 price set out in the menu. We're charged the full amount, even though they fail to deliver the whole plate.
As a bagel bakery, Kivas deserves much more than it gets here. As a restaurant, it deserves much less.
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