It’s 7 p.m. on a Tuesday night. Outside, it’s already dark and a bit blowy — one of those harbingers of nights to come. I manage to snag the last seat in Sweet Obsession’s cozy café, sitting solo in a room of dessert-happy couples with their heads bent together like preening swans.
While I wait for my friend to arrive, I ogle the pastry case. There’s good old carrot cake, frosted in artfully swooshed cream cheese icing. The chocolate hazelnut zuccotto — chocolate cake, chocolate mousse, hazelnut mousse and chocolate ganache — is a flawless dome with hazelnuts clinging to its edges. There’s a chocolate mousse cake in three layers (dark, milk and white, naturally), elaborate fruit tarts and a collection of flat-topped cheesecakes.
Since 1993, Sweet Obsession has been plying Vancouver’s West Siders with cakes, cookies and pastries. Prior to opening, co-owner Lorne Tyczenski trained at a patisserie in West Vancouver to learn the trade. “[It was] very little money and long hours, but I learned a lot,” he says over the phone.
That turned into a home-based business making wedding and special occasion cakes and then supplying restaurants with desserts. His first two customers? Bishop’s and the now-defunct English Bay Café.
But Tyczenski and Stephen Greenham, his husband and business partner, always wanted their own place. It was Greenham who found the location on West 16th Avenue near Trafalgar.
Today, it’s a friendly neighbourhood strip, but back then, it wasn’t much, and it took some convincing before Tyczenski agreed.
“I would go there and hang around and watch the traffic, and there was next to nobody. But Stephen was in real estate at the time so I went with his wisdom,” says Tyczenski.
“And it was the right choice.”
It’s not just the neighbourhood that has changed. “When we started, there were few European-style cake and pastry shops. I’ve noticed that people want things that don’t just look good, like ‘Oh, that’s a big cake.’ They’re more particular. They want quality, not quantity.”
Sweet Obsession is, well, obsessed with quality. Nearly everything is made in-house, including the candied citrus peel, which many bakers buy because it’s so labour-intensive to make. “Short of growing vanilla, we do it all on site,” says Tyczenski.
Over 23 years, the bakery has settled into a groove with its cake selection. You won’t try something one day and come back the next week to find an upstart in its place.
“Some people come for many years and for their birthdays, buy the same cake. We ask them, ‘Why don’t you try something else?’ and they say, ‘No, we love this cake.’”
That said, there’s always something new in the shop, such as the kouign amann (kween-yaman). Tyczenski tasted one in San Francisco last year and knew he had to reproduce it. Think of a croissant, laced with caramelized sugar and a touch of salt. (If that’s not extravagant enough, there’s a version with chocolate on top.)
There are also modernizations behind the scenes, like a composting machine that sits in the back of the shop. Tyczenski explains Sweet Obsession and its sister restaurant, Trafalgar’s, used to generate enough waste to fill a dumpster that was emptied four times a week. Today, their waste is limited to one residential garbage can that’s emptied every two weeks.
Back in the café, I catch up with my friend over slices of cake and cups of tea. The couples have been replaced by chattering students in university-branded sweatshirts. The whole time, there’s been a steady stream of people leaving with whole cakes. It seems like everyone leaves with a smile — and so do I.
Sweet Obsession is located at 2611 West 16th Ave. Contact: 604-739-0555, sweetobsession.ca.
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