La Rose Specialty Foods and Fine Italian Bakery

A Milton household can solve dinner, dessert, and the week's bread in a single stop at La Rose, and plenty do. The breadth is the point. The Bronte Street storefront works at once as a bakery, a deli, a cheese counter, a midday hot-food counter, a caterer, and an Italian specialty grocer — the kind of place where one customer leaves with a tray of veal for a crowd, a box of cannoli for Sunday, and a loaf of Calabrese for Monday's sandwiches.

The bakery case is where most visits begin. The individual-dessert list runs to Sicilian cannoli filled with ricotta and made fresh daily, sfogliatelle layered around a ricotta-and-orange centre, almond-flour macarons, chocolate eclairs piped with cream and finished in ganache, and Portuguese custard tarts the counter keeps every day. The cakes go bigger: a Bacio Cake of chocolate-hazelnut pastry cream and roasted hazelnuts under ribbons of dark ganache, tiramisu built on espresso-soaked ladyfingers and real mascarpone, red velvet in three layers. The case keeps a line of gluten-free desserts as well, so a mixed box can include everyone. The bread holds up its end — Calabrese baked in round, ring, Vienna, and ciabatta forms with a crunchy crust, extra-large focaccia in rosemary-and-sea-salt or tomato-and-olive, cheddar-swirled cheese sticks, and bagels in seven varieties.