SOL Bakehouse

Maniza Naseery and Iden Rahmaty left a dental hygienist's chair and a classroom to open a bakery. SOL Bakehouse is what came of it — a sister-owned bakery and café on Macdonell Street in downtown Guelph. The name is Latin for sun, and the sisters built the place as much for their home city as for themselves, both having come back to Guelph to do it. What sits on the counter is a pastry case that leads with filled croissants and a cookie lineup that turns over through the week, backed by a coffee bar and a savoury lunch menu. From the first look it reads less like a coffee shop that happens to bake than a bakery that decided to feed people all day.

The filled croissant is the thing to build a visit around. The Raspberry Mascarpone Croissant leads — a classic French croissant packed with mascarpone cream and layered with fresh raspberry compote — with the Lemon Blueberry, the Almond, and the Nutella close behind, and savoury turns like the Onion and Goat Cheese Danish for anyone who wants the pastry without the sugar. The cookie case runs from a Chocolate Chunk built on Belgian milk chocolate to a Kinder cookie studded with white and milk chocolate, and it rotates six gourmet flavours through the week, with an iced lemon cranberry scone, a Maple Pecan Butter Tart, and a vegan banana walnut muffin rounding out the fresh bakes. The drinks reach past drip coffee: a Spanish Latte, a Vanilla Butterfly Latte tinted with organic butterfly pea flower, and an Iced Strawberry Matcha made with ceremonial-grade matcha from Kyoto over a layer of strawberry sauce.

The savoury side is where SOL argues it is more than a morning stop. The Smoked Turkey Pesto and Swiss Sandwich stacks locally sourced turkey with arugula, roasted red pepper, and a zesty garlic aioli on panini-pressed ciabatta; the Montreal Melt runs Montreal smoked brisket, pickles, and a cowboy butter sauce through the same press; and a Pesto Grilled Cheese and Poppy's hand-rolled Montreal-style bagels hold down the lighter end. A Roast Beef and Swiss carries the same house style, with locally sourced beef, vine-ripe tomato, and the garlic aioli again, and the deli is built without lactose, nitrates, or MSG. The local sourcing is deliberate — it is part of how the sisters describe the place, not a line bolted on after the fact. A bakery counter that can turn a croissant order into a full lunch keeps a customer around longer than the pastry alone would.

The origin is a homecoming. Naseery worked as a dental hygienist and Rahmaty taught school just outside Guelph before the two opened SOL together in the fall of 2025. Local reporting traces Naseery's baking back to childhood and a well-worn copy of Anna Olson's Sugar, and both sisters have described the bakehouse as a way to serve the community they grew up in. That intent surfaces in the details — the local sourcing, the six-flavour cookie rotation that gives regulars a reason to check back, the catering and pre-order boxes for anyone feeding a crowd. For both of them it is a first bakery, opened in a downtown storefront a neighbourhood café left behind.

SOL keeps daytime hours, opening early and closing by evening, and it works best taken as a counter: order at the bakery or online, build a coffee-and-croissant run, or stretch the stop into a sandwich lunch. The catering page waits for the bigger orders, and the pastry case holds whatever doesn't fit a category. What changes is the cookie board — six flavours that turn over every week, which is the quiet reason a bakehouse named for the sun gets a second visit and a third.