This seems like an unfair marketing ploy. How do you say no when your daughter has a gingerbread girl in her hand and begging in her eyes? It looked to be a great way to encourage impulse shopping, until Helen, the owner, came by.

“Take it! It’s my present to you,” the petite, polish lady said to the youngster. Helen and her husband George own T&T Café and Bakery, which they run with the help of their two children and a gaggle of relatives. New customers, regulars and staff are drawn together into an extended family of sorts, in spite of the hustle and bustle of the lunch rush.

Customers order at the front counter and then sit to be served at one of the twenty tables. The menu is varied and enticing, featuring a mélange of Polish and Canadian comfort foods. Pondering aloud what to order can lead to a sudden onslaught of opinions from staff, regulars, or even the newbie who has just tasted ‘the best soup I’ve ever had.’

Fresh, homemade soups and salads are a great choice for starters. Make sure you specify that you want a small, though, or you will get a meal-sized serving of crisp, garden veggies or a steaming bowl of soup full of cubed beef or chicken. Another delectable alternative would be one of the pastries offered hot from the oven. Stuffed with spinach, polish sausage or just a plain croissant, these delights are flakey and light.

The daily specials vary and are usually comfort foods. They can include Swedish meatballs, perogies or rich and savory pot roast. These are typically served with mashed potato as a side, but salad can be substituted. All day breakfasts are also on the menu and can be made to order; egg white omelets, grilled tomatoes and a myriad of other modifications are cheerfully accepted and cooked to perfection.

T&T is open from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m., but Helen’s kitchen runs much longer hours in order to create pies and baked goods that can be bought by the slice for dessert or purchased whole and taken home to enjoy later. Waffles, hot off the grill and tantalizingly covered in sugar-soaked strawberries and whipped cream, are a fantastic dessert option, too. A recently acquired specialty coffee machine offers a variety of espresso-based drinks, with lattes deserving particular mention. For a lighter dessert option, pair a latte or cappuccino with a cookie from the front counter. While the cookie probably won’t be free, it will be freshly baked, beautifully decorated and delicious down to the last crumb!

Beck goes on to cover a variety of topics in his 22 chapters, bringing wit and wisdom to the subjects of global warming, toupees, blind dating, the United Nations and everything in between. Written in an easy-to-read style and full of sidebars that are meant to draw laughs, this book is a great addition to any comedy-lover’s collection.

Beck on buying a hybrid:

“Honestly, if buying a hybrid would really help, I would gladly do it. What black-hearted nightmare of a human being is going to put the fact that a Honda Insight looks like a retarded space ship ahead of the future of the entire globe? But what these same environmentalists don’t tell you is just how small a piece of the puzzle your choice of automobile really is…Just the increase in the amount of coal that China will burn by 2020 will send as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 3 billion Ford Expeditions, each driven 15,000 miles a year…At its current pace, it would take Ford 15,000 years even to sell that many.