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Sort-of Secret: Tatin Bakehouse, a French bakery in Oakville with a Michelin connection

Pastry chef Lili Linda left her post at Hexagon to open her own pâtisserie

By Christine Peddie| Photography by Shlomi Amiga
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Sort-of Secret: Tatin Bakehouse, a French bakery in Oakville with a Michelin connection

The sort-of-secret: Tatin Bakehouse, an impressive bakery that specializes in classic French pastries with global flavours You may have heard of it if: You’ve followed pastry chef Lili Linda’s career since her time at Oakville’s Michelin-starred Hexagon. But you probably haven’t tried it because: Tucked away on an industrial strip in Oakville, it takes determination (and ideally a car) to reach.

Unless you own a vehicle or aspire to, there’s never been a very compelling reason to visit the furthest reaches of Wyecroft Road. Dotted with auto body shops, used car dealerships and a monotonous collection of office buildings, it’s a strip most people head to only when necessary. That is, until pastry chef Lili Linda and her business partner, Sheila Wang, chose it as the location for their pastry shop, Tatin Bakehouse. Now, driven by the promise of lusty curry puffs, fruit-crowned croissants, thick-crusted canelés and pandan-infused flans, pastry buffs have plenty of reasons to frequent this previously unremarkable stretch in Oakville.

Pastry chef Lili Linda at her Oakville bakery, Tatin Bakehouse

A former product design student, Linda turned her love of art and knack for minutiae into a career in baking after moving to Toronto from the US in 2014. “Design is a very big part of me. That’s how I introduced myself to baking—doing something finer, finessed, like fine dining. Those kinds of things have always intrigued me,” she says. “I ended up going to the Bonnie Gordon College of Confectionary Arts. It was very helpful, but the focus was often on high-end wedding cakes, which wasn’t really something that I was looking to do.”

In place of constructing complicated cakes for persnickety brides, Linda longed to work with classic French pâtisserie. “I just love French pastry, the way you can play with the flavours,” says Linda. After she left Bonnie Gordon, Linda worked at Butter Avenue and the Tempered Room, where she absorbed recipes and perfected techniques, creating a solid foundation to complement her dessert-decorating savvy.

Sort-of Secret: Tatin Bakehouse, a French bakery in Oakville with a Michelin connection

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Pastry chef Lili Linda uses a torch to finish a dessert

A move to Oakville landed Linda at Hexagon, an ambitious addition to the town’s dining scene that earned a Michelin star in 2024. “I worked for a year with chef Sean MacDonald, and then Rafa took over. I learned quite a lot from him. He has a really good palate,” she says of the restaurant’s current executive chef, Rafael Covarrubias, who was awarded the Michelin Guide’s Young Chef Award last year.

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Working her way up from pastry cook to pastry chef, Linda created eye-catching plated desserts to match Hexagon’s top-tier dishes. Following Covarrubias’s lead, she played with French and Mexican flavours, sending out eye-catching creations like precise bars of banana cake topped with tight whorls of spiced milk chocolate ganache montée. In others, like a pandan tangyuan and a baba au rhum crowned with cupolas of kaya custard jam, she offered a glimpse of her Asian heritage. “I had a lot of freedom to do basically whatever flavours I wanted,” she says.

French pastries and a drink on the table at Tatin Bakehouse
A croissant sits on a wooden pedestal

After leaving the restaurant in 2022, Linda was already dreaming—albeit cautiously—of opening her own place. “I wasn’t really confident yet,” she admits. Instead of recklessly jumping in, she began a bi-weekly dessert box business over Instagram, offering customers the chance to sample her goods while she learned about the business side of baking.

She also reached out to Sheila Wang, a cook from her Hexagon days. “I always knew I wanted to grow for a broader audience and sell both savoury and sweet items,” Linda says. “That’s when I brought Sheila on board—so I could focus on the sweet side of things.”

When the duo felt ready to expand, the Wyecroft space, with its high ceilings and reams of sunlight, felt right. “The first time I saw it, it was kind of like love at first sight,” Linda says. “I love the way it’s very industrial looking. We looked at a few places afterward, but nothing compared.”

Inside Tatin Bakehouse, a French bakery in Oakville
The kitchen at Tatin Bakehouse, a French-inspired bakery in Oakville

Still, the location required a substantial amount of work, like digging up the floors to add plumbing and upgrading the wiring. It also needed to look as cute as the team’s edible offerings. “I always love Japandi, Scandinavian-Japanese style,” says Linda, who turned to her friend Haewon Jung of Haeven Studio to design the space. “It’s very clean, neat-looking with lots of wood for warmth,” she says. “It’s amazing what Haewon can do. Her designs are very simple, very clean, but all the little details—the curved edges, how ergonomic the chairs are—those kinds of things are very important to me.”

Florist Juni Lee of floral design company Horae added dried flower arrangements to liven up the bakery. “When I started this space, I thought about how I would really like to also help some of my friends who have businesses of their own,” says Linda. “I want to showcase them.” Despite its petite size, the bakery is a product of the expert work of many deft hands.

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The lineup at Tatin shows Linda’s affinity for pastries and golden Viennoiseries, the arresting selection constructed primarily from buttery pâte brisée or textbook puff pastry. “We go through 15 to 20 kilos of laminated dough per week,” she says.

A person cuts a cake into slices

Related: “Pastry helped me embrace my queerness”—How chef Jayden Park baked his way to self-acceptance

A chef finishes a slice of cake with a dusting of sugar

The menu ranges from savoury snacks—melt-in-your-mouth chicken pies, curry puffs as layered as tutus and Indonesian-style rendang shepherd’s pies—to signature sweets, like a crème brûlée croissant garnished with sunny squares of mango. Some of Linda’s creations, like a nutty shortbread cookie hugging a puddle of shallot-and-sesame-flavoured caramel, marry the best of both worlds in surprising ways. There’s also sourdough and milk bread, along with speciality Chinese teas and coffee made using Rufino beans.

“We try to incorporate classic French techniques with a blend of South and East Asian flavours,” says Linda. “Inspiration comes mostly from food that I’ve loved and the food that I grew up with,” she adds, pointing out a hand pie filled with a fragrant candlenut-studded filling inspired by her mother’s recipe for gulai ayam, a dish her family often ate during Lunar New Year.

A person takes madeleines out of a pan
A chocolate canele

But the duo doesn’t like to limit themselves. “Maybe one day I’m craving baklava, you know?" says Linda. “We don’t have a label for what direction we’re going.”

So, when the pastry-obsessed make the pilgrimage to Wyecroft, what they’ll find on Tatin’s shelves—custard tarts or pistachio chocolate croissants, tartes tatin or baklava—is anyone’s guess. But what’s certain is that it will be strikingly delicious, expertly made and perhaps a little surprising. “I wish Oakville offered a little bit more diversity,” says Linda. “This is something I hope to bring so that places like Tatin are not just in Toronto—and so people in Oakville don’t feel left out.”

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2345 Wyecroft Rd., unit 20, Oakville, @tatinbakehouse

A portrait of Oakville pastry chef Lili Linda
The exterior of Oakville bakery Tatin Bakehouse

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