RPM Bakehouse

RPM Bakehouse is the bakery and café Pearl Morissette built for the daytime. The Jordan Village wine estate put its farm, its garden and its name behind a walk-in counter, and the result reads less like a winery sideline than a serious bakehouse in its own right: Ontario heritage grains milled for slow-fermented sourdough, loaves with dark, blistered crusts and an open crumb, and the same care for provenance running through everything that leaves the kitchen. The grain has a source, the dairy has a name, the garden has a gate just up the road.

The pastry case rewards an early arrival. A buckwheat financier, nutty and barely set, shares the shelf with choux au craquelin, butter croissants, a currant tart and a raspberry and lavender scone that is one of the bakehouse's signature sweets. The list shifts with the season, and regulars treat a visit as a standing appointment; loaves and baguettes move quickly, and the kitchen takes pre-orders for the staples worth planning around. Even the coffee carries the house's hand: it can be sweetened with syrups made in-house — lavender and mountain mint, rose thyme and rose petal, sweetgrass and meadowsweet — flavours drawn from the same garden-and-field vocabulary as the plates.