Choux Atelier’s smoked salmon croissant is too good to be tr…

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Choux Atelier
222 Queen St. (just west of Bank street), 343-988-3568, choux-atelier.ca
Open: Daily from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Price: $6.99 for a smoked salmon onigiri croissant

A wise Ottawa chef once told me to stick to ordering the obvious specialties at big chain restaurants rather than wander further afield on a menu.

This was her way of saying that when I went to Boston Pizza, I screwed up when I chose, and was disappointed by, the Big Dipper steak sandwich.

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But I disregarded her counsel this month and threw caution to the winds when I just had to have the smoked salmon onigiri croissant at Choux Atelier.

The wee downtown bakery, which opened last winter on Queen Street, is named after choux à la crème, the oh-so-crave-able French dough balls filled with flavoured cream.

If you want some of those puffy little sweet treats, Choux Atelier has you covered. On the menu there are choux both classic and inventive, including flavours such as premium vanilla, chocolate, Vietnamese coffee (chef-owner Ann Nguyen is Vietnamese), matcha, strawberry and cream, mango sticky rice and more.

But when I visited Choux Atelier, I was struck by a more savoury option. I couldn’t resist the superbly crisp, open-face croissant, a.k.a. a danish, which in Denmark is called wienerbrød (Vienna bread), as in les viennoiseries in France. Thanks, Austria!

What made this pastry a must-order? You try resisting this finely crafted feat of laminated dough, wrapped around a baked egg and topped with smoked salmon, seaweed and house-made, spicy-funky gochujang mayonnaise.

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Sealing the deal at home, minutes after I’d bought this umami-bomb, the yolk of the egg, which was baked along with the pastry, was still deliciously runny.

Where’s the rice in this onigiri, you might ask, knowing as you do that in Japan, onigiri are rice balls wrapped in sheets of seaweed and around fillings that can be savoury or sour. I guess you could say that Choux Atelier’s treat has ingeniously swapped out rice and subbed in buttery pastry plus a baked egg, with consequences that should provoke a Pavlovian response.

This cross-cultural mashup was added in mid-July to Choux Atelier’s menu. Up to a dozen of them are available daily, but they have been known to sell out by noon, says the bakery’s manager, Khushi Sen.

Given that, you’ll be taking risks if you wait until 6 p.m., hoping to snag one of these beauties once it’s been discounted. While the savoury croissant normally goes for $6.99, its price (along with those of anything else still available) drops by 20 per cent in the hour before the store’s 7 p.m. closing time. “Let’s savour the day’s final moments with delicious treats as we reduce food waste together,” says a social media post from Choux Atelier.

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But if there’s no salmon onigiri croissant to be had, you might have to settle for some of the bakery’s delectable, namesake choux. There are worse fates.

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Do you have a favourite place to get a little treat in Ottawa? Send Peter Hum an e-mail to let him know.

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