Restaurants
Ding Dong Pastries & Cafe
The Ding Dong bun house is a narrow, pleasant Chinatown shop. The walls are lined with tanned and golden buns, reclining under steam-clouded domes, weirdly reminiscent of Brigitte Bardot in a soft-focus lens.
Before we go on, let me be the first to admit that yes, the grubby labels on the display cases look vile. But please do note that they're on the outsides of the cases. The staff here is pretty solid on their hygiene- I saw a customer drop a bun on the floor, and when an employee tossed it in the trash, she used waxed paper to touch it, so she wouldn't get her food-handling gloves dirty. I think you can rest assured that your interior cleanliness is safe here.
So grab a golden tray and a little pair of tongs to browse the shop, piling individual buns and tarts on your tray; the lady at the cash will bag or box them, as you prefer, on your way out. The food is surprisingly inexpensive: I got the six buns on this tray for a trifling $3.80:
Ding Dong's Chicken Bun ($0.60, the one with the swirl on top), is a light, slightly sweet dough filled with a small amount of chicken and frozen vegetables- not ambrosia, but good enough for a breakfast on the run. The Ham and Cheese Bun (the deeply-bronzed little fellow on the far right, also $0.60) is salty, greasy, and delicious.
The white-flour Steamed Pork Buns (again, $0.60), known in dim sum circles as bao, are mild, dense, chewy white flour dough pillowed around minced pork with scallions, ginger, and garlic.
The best bun of all is the evocatively-named Milk Jam Bun, yet another treat priced at a mere $0.60. It's sweet wheat bread filled with a tasty, creamy vanilla custard: Chinatown's version of the Boston Creme donut. As Mike Myers might say, once you try this treat, you'll crave it fortnightly. (Wow, that is a quote from an old movie. Please comment in kind if you get that embarassingly archaic reference; don't leave me hanging here.)
Also on hand are Koh Fan Banana Rolls - smooth, soft, chewy chunks of glutinous rice dough, subtly flavoured with fake banana essence and a thin stripe of red bean paste. They're perhaps a bit of an acquired taste- similar to Korean duk- but there's something about that bubblegummy, chewy, glutinous rice texture that I have dreams about. Seriously. Am I saying too much? Maybe. Anyway, at $2 for 6 chewy bites, you should definitely give these a try.
There's space for a few people to sit and nosh in the small cafe area; but where the Ding Dong really excels is in its ability to stock your fridge with a whole week's worth of quickie breakfasts and snacks for under $5. So don't be a ding dong, eat some Ding Dong. Yeah, I'm done.
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I usually frequent Furama bakery, further south of Dundas on Spadina. The buns are fantastic, but a little more expensive, I believe. It's always packed with people, but I find the staff a little surly and the hygiene to be a bit suspect (the pastry trays customers use look a bit grubby, and the protective plastic lids on the tray cases are routinely left open.)
I've only been to Ding Dong's once, and I found the buns to be a bit stale - granted, the place was just about to close, and I'm assuming the baked goods had been sitting out for most of the day - and the staff were quite pleasant, even after a long day's shift. After reading this review, I'll have to give this place another try. :)
it's ok to eat unrefrigerated beef buns because the beef is essentially sterilized when it gets cooked. so once it's cooked, (as long as you don't touch it to add new bacteria), it won't go bad in an unrefrigerated case for a day. in this case it's protected from new bacteria by the bun itself.
being at room temperature is not bad for food. the problem is that room temperature allows bacteria to proliferate, especially in high-protein foods. so if you kill most of the bacteria before allowing the food to sit at room temperature, very little bacteria will proliferate. (cooked ground beef is more or less sterile. on the other hand, raw ground beef is full of bacteria, so only a short while at room temperature means lots of bad bacteria.)
anyway, these buns won't make you sick after a day out of the fridge, i've eaten enough to prove that! maybe after a couple days... but ding dong has a high enough customer turnover that that won't happen.
and not to be a total nerd, but i kind of am, and anyway, this is cool: louis pasteur put boiled (ie, pasteruized) meat broth in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur#Germ_theory"; target="blank">a bottle with a long, loopy neck</a>. this allowed air to reach the meat broth, but any dust or bacterial spores were trapped in the neck of the bottle by gravity, and could not reach the sterile, boiled meat broth. the broth in those bottles stayed unspoiled for DECADES, even at room temperature, because no bacteria contaminated them. cool!
Plastic packaging, as comforting as it may be, is a bit wasteful and certainly won't protect you from any contaminants introduced by bakery employees.
There's a Korean bakery that is just a bit East of Christie on Bloor that sells pizza buns. I think the big PAT supermarket on the same street might also have them. However I've never tried one and am not sure if it be at all like what you're looking for. Just thought I'd mention it anyway. There's still plenty of yummy food on that street if they're not the right buns though! =)
As for worries about cleanliness, the place seemed pretty spotless to me, the tags are slightly yellowed from age and wear, but I didn't get the feeling that the place was at all dirty.
I'm probably going to go back there to try a coconut bun - after I finish my diet... *sigh*