Hum: JnJ Bakery makes unbelievably affordable Korean treats

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JnJ Bakery Cafe

62 Barrette St., 613-489-0564, facebook.com/jnjbakerycafe

Open: Tuesday to Saturday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., closed Sunday, Monday

Prices: Korean snacks and baked goods $3 and up

“In South Korea,” Sung-hae Lee says, “we have bakeries on every corner.”

Ottawa, sadly, is not so fortunate. Still, we should be very thankful for Lee’s wee Korean bakery, which is tucked away on a residential corner in Vanier. It’s called JnJ Bakery Cafe, and you’ll find it on Barrette Street where the much-loved taco place Ola Cocina Taqueria had been for quite a few years.

In the weeks before the holidays, I kept returning to JnJ, after seeing a friend’s social media post that raved about Lee’s bulgogi croquette. I like bulgogi and I like croquettes. Lee’s bulgogi croquette, it turned out, was a perfect mash-up — a perfectly fried, breaded, and bready, savoury snack blessed with an ample, well-seasoned, sliced-beef filling inside in a crisp-shelled, almost chewy ball. (For those who want to try to replicate the croquette at home, Lee attributes her feat to the Chinese tangzhong technique, in which flour is cooked with water before baking.)

That croquette was so good and so cheap that it made me want to work my way through the well-stocked showcase of Lee’s humble shop.

Bulgogi also stars in the hefty bulgogi burger, which at $11.98 must be the most expensive thing that I’ve had at JnJ. It was delicious, of course, although I might have preferred two bulgogi croquettes even more.

Of her prices, Lee says: “I started very low. I didn’t think I was good enough to make the right price. I wanted to be an affordable bakery, not high-end.”

Among the other savoury choices, I can vouch for the curried chicken croquette, another tasty little marvel that I took home and reheated.

Although I lean more into savoury than sweet, I have nothing but good things to say about JnJ’s sweet (but not overly so) Korean buns of various flavours. They were all winners, with lovely crisp exteriors and fluffy interiors. The standout buns were the so-called “soboro” buns, whose name refers (in Japanese, not Korean) to the streusel-y crust that tops them. But I also could not fault the mocha buns and the buns that starred a house-made red bean paste.

Lee clearly admires French baking, as she also makes good macarons and a nut-forward, not-too-sweet, single-serving almond tart that I would probably devour every week or so if I lived closer to Vanier.

I like Lee’s story almost as much as I admire her food. She’s 50 but has been in Canada for 30 years, mostly in Ottawa. For many years, she worked in the kitchens of chain and franchise eateries, doing prep work. You could say she was an anonymous hero in the local restaurant industry.

But Lee told me that really liked baking and that no business was making the items that she loved to eat when she was young, back in Korea. Accordingly, she went back to Korea eight years ago and took a four-month program at a baking school. After that, the mother of two — her teenager’s initials are J and J, as in the name of the bakery — began selling her baked goods.

Some of her baked goods were available at Seoul Mart on Pretoria Avenue. For a time, she shared space with Urban Reifen, a tire shop in Nepean. She opened on Barrette Street about a year and a half ago.

There are just two small tables at JnJ, but you may well want to linger there, as the coffee is fine, because Lee also trained as a barista when she went back to Korea to learn how to bake.

“I baked morning and afternoon, and went to the barista school in the evening,” she says.

I fear that by writing about it, I might be blowing up the secret cachet of this little gem in Vanier. I do think there ought to be lineups out the door, given how much I’ve liked Lee’s food. And yet, it’s always been quiet when I’ve visited.

“My marketing is not working for my business. I’m still kind of struggling,” Lee says.

“All the pregnant Korean ladies come here,” she does say, because she makes items that they crave, just as she did when she was pregnant.

But you don’t have to be pregnant, or Korean, to appreciate the artfulness and quality of the food that Lee puts in her showcase day after day.

And if you need further reason to like JnJ, consider this: Lee donated all the proceeds that she made on Dec. 21 last year, $1,084.14, to the Ottawa Food Bank.

Lee says that hers was the first Korean bakery in Ottawa, although she is apparently going to meet up with some competition.

Last May, the Seoul-based multinational chain of bakery-cafés called Paris Baguette announced plans to expand into Ottawa and even open eight locations here. It already has stores in Toronto, Calgary, and Edmonton.

“There is no exact timeline… Paris Baguette is looking for the right partners who will introduce it to the region,” I was told when I asked a PR person for more information.

I hope that whenever the more posh and expensive Paris Baguette ultimately comes to town, it won’t eclipse Lee’s more low-key but authentic little treasure. Go to Vanier to try her wares and I think you’ll agree.

phum@postmedia.com

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