Bangladesh Grocery & Variety Store

This is one of the few grocery stores in the west-​end that carries a gamut of pan-​Indian/​Bangladeshi products (very limited fresh produce though) and not just predominantly North Indian ones. If you want an esoteric and hard to pronounce Indian spice or ingredient that your gourmet cookbook demands you’ll probably find it here. Some of the packaged items like loose leaf tea can sometimes be past their best before date, so you gotta be on your toes.
At the very back of the store there’s a small butchery section that does rollicking business, especially during South Asian holiday season. I’ve seen the butcher deftly cleave an entire, skinned animal that I think was a goat when it was alive!
This store has been a life-​saver on many occasions. Once we had a bunch of people over and didn’t have the time to cook a lavish spread a-​la the sub-​continent, so we asked the old proprietor to help us out and one of his contacts catered the shindig. The prepared food got top marks from the traditionalists. The store folks have also complied with many of our requests for non North Indian delectables that can’t be sourced easily elsewhere in the GTA.
For the quality of its products, especially packaged goods, Bangladesh Grocery and Variety Store warrants a 3 (or maybe even a tad less) but for the niche that it successfully occupies in the west-​end it deserves a quartet of shiny stars.