Ming’s for authentic Asian baking

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This article was published 13/06/2016 (3595 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Step into Ming’s Bakery at 1433 Logan Ave. and you might think you’ve ended up in a quaint bakery from yesteryear, the kind you step off a cobblestone street to enter.

That’s exactly the aesthetic that the Li family was going for. Jenny Li and her father Ming recently opened their shop on the corner of Logan Avenue and Quelch Street, where they hope to offer Winnipeg authentic Asian breads, cakes and desserts.

“We came to Winnipeg in 2014 and bought this place and starting applying with the City, getting permits,” Jenny said. “It’s a long process.”

Ming did the majority of the building’s construction and renovations, which feature beautiful stone walls, roughhewn wood details and ambient lighting.

“I learned from my friends and from some constructors, and if I have any questions I just ask them and they are all kind and they teach me everything,” Ming said. “I enjoy doing it myself.”

“You have that idea sometimes going through some of the contractors that you can’t get the idea across,” Jenny said. “When you have a vision it’s really hard to get that across so we tried a few contractors in the beginning and then we just felt like it wasn’t matching, so we thought, let’s just do it ourselves, even though it takes so much longer.”

The idea of opening a bakery came about from the growing number of people asking Ming to make them custom desserts. When the Lis first arrived in Calgary from Taiwan in 1998, Ming began work as a baker at Tim Hortons, after which he managed the bakery section at T & T Supermarket, an Asian food grocer. 

“We came to Winnipeg and I started telling my friends, ‘Oh my dad’s a baker,’ so they said, ‘Can he make a birthday cake?’” Jenny said. “Then by word of mouth it got bigger and bigger and that’s why we thought, well let’s open a bakery.

“It’s a rustic kind of feel, because I always had this dream of having a little local community kind of bakery, where you feel like you’re not just going into a grocery store, which lacks that personal touch to things.”

Winnipeg seemed like the place to set up shop, where Jenny learned that despite having a large Asian population, the city has few to no Asian bakeries.

“I was surprised because in Edmonton there was pretty much too many,” Jenny said. “A lot of people will go to Vancouver for good Asian baking.”

Ming said he’s hoping to offer quality Asian baking a little closer to home. The store will serve daily baked bread as well as cakes, macarons, cream puffs and cupcakes. Unlike Western desserts, Ming’s cakes are done in more traditional flavours such as green tea, taro and mango, and are less sweet and heavy.

“I’m not only trying to create a business,” he said. “I enjoy the whole process. I’d like for people to come here and not only buy bread because they’re hungry, but to also enjoy it while they are eating. That’s my goal.”

Ming said even if the shop is busy, he plans on stopping to chat with customers and make friends with his neighbours so the store has a community feel.

Following a soft opening, Ming’s Bakery officially opened on June 13.