Heavenly Cafe

The cinnamon buns are a weekend event. Heavenly Cafe bakes them Friday through Sunday only, and they are the item the counter is built around — reason enough to time a Collingwood errand for midmorning, while a fresh tray is still warm. Around them runs the rest of the pastry case: carrot cake, dark chocolate mousse cake, French macarons, drinking chocolate. This is a European-style café and dessert counter first, and somewhere to have lunch second, run by an owner who came to baking by way of chocolate.

The lunch board reads like a pastry kitchen that learned to make a meal. Croissants do double duty as sandwiches — brie and apple, tarragon chicken — and the cold case carries tuna salad, egg salad, and smoked salmon with cream cheese on pumpernickel. There is a quiche Lorraine, a soup of the day that turns over through the week, and a house-made granola bowl for the morning crowd. A weekly special rides alongside the regulars, the one line on the board that changes without notice. Breakfast leans on croissants and bagels rather than a griddle, which is to say the kitchen's instincts are a baker's instincts before they are a short-order cook's. Nothing on the menu is engineered to impress at a distance. It is the kind of list a regular reads once and then orders from by memory, pairing a sandwich with whatever came out of the oven that morning.