The Maltese pastizzi bakers who turned down $2 million to sell out to Toronto developers

They often say things are better in the ‘old country’. But these two Maltese migrants have a lesson to teach to their compatriots: money is not everything.

While property speculation and development runs Maltese lives, on Toronto’s Dundas Street West – one of the oldest neighbourhoods for Maltese migrants who settled in the Canadian city – the Buttigieg family is refusing to sell out.

They have owned the Malta Bake Shop since 1983 where they sell Maltese pastizzi, timpana, honey rings, and all the tasty Maltese fare we have on the island.

 But the couple has refused to sell out to a developer who wants to turn the area into nine new townhouses with rooftop terraces, high efficiency interior lighting, and contemporary Italian Lube kitchens.

“He offered us a million dollars for the bakery and a million dollars for the house next door, which we also own — so two million dollars,” Antoinette Buttigieg told Joe Connor of The National Post, who writes of the gentrification that has been buying out the “city’s disappearing past… old Macedonian shoe repair guys, Italian barbers, Polish delis and, yes, mom-and-pop Maltese bakeries, getting pushed out of a gentrifying area, either because of the owners’ advanced age, a dwindling customer base or a lucrative offer to sell.”

Malta Bake Shop is resisting the million-dollar allure, however.

“What are we going to do if we sell, we’re not young — but we’re not old — and this shop has been 40-years of our lives,” Antoinette says. “For me, it is not a job. I feel like the shop is more like our living room and our customers, they are like family. What would we do without our family?”

The couple met in Malta in 1977 — in a cemetery. Antoinette was grieving her dead grandmother and a priest dispatched Charlie to open the cemetery gates. Charlie fumbled with the lock. Antoinette steadied his hand. Three months later they were married.

“I love my wife for so many things,” Charlie said. “We argue, too, but, you know, the older people in Malta, they might not have had much education, but they had all these sayings and her father used to say to me, “If the water doesn’t get rough sometimes — it stinks.”

The couple raised four children with the bakery as the focal point of family life.

“Do we want to build up condominiums in Toronto? For sure, by all means. But if you start tearing down places with a significant heritage — what do you stand for — do you just forget about the past? The Malta Bake Shop — that building is 100-plus years old — and there is a story of a community there,” Charlie told The National Post.

The shop had been a Maltese-owned shoe store in the past, and before that, in the 1920s, a Maltese grocery and magnet for Maltese newcomers to Canada. “This building has a history,” Antoinette said.