| Best (relatively) recent arrival to Calgary's food scene: The Eiffel Tower Bakery
You know what's great? To be able to walk into a relatively anonymous storefront on 17th Avenue and be in the middle of a working French bakery. You can tell it's authentic from the large Nicolas Abry oven, the bakers pounding butter into submission, and the snatches of French that you can hear from the back while you're standing at the cash.
You can also tell because the quality of the bread and the pastries is fabulous, and could go toe-to-toe with bakeries in France any day. The regular baguettes have a great crust, a medium crumb and lots of taste, and the sourdough baguettes are out of this world for serving with cheese. You can also buy rye and multigrain loaves which are dense and flavourful, and make great toast. The croissants are flaky and buttery (I think they're the best I've tried in Calgary) and the almond croissants are unbelievably decadent. You can also buy pain au chocolat, brioche, raspberry tarts, lemon tarts... yum.
We really needed a good French bakery in Calgary. We now have an extremely good one. The Eiffel Tower (1013 17th Ave. S.W. and 502 25th Ave. N.W.) is open every day from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. and on Sunday from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. |
