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Hani Tawil knows first-hand the passion this small morsel of bread evokes in his customers.

“The pita brings so much emotion and memory for people. When it’s not available, I get calls about it daily,” said Tawil, the store manager at Marché Adonis.

Since opening seven years ago on the Golden Mile strip in Scarborough, Adonis has been embraced as being one of the best markets for Middle Eastern foodstuffs. It is a grocery store, butcher shop, bakery, and hot counter all in one sprawling complex.

Scarborough has always had small Middle Eastern specialty grocery shops, going back decades. Many of them can be found on Lawrence Avenue East, nestled next to Lebanese restaurants and Palestinian shawarma spots. These shops specialized in specific items, the halal butcher, the bakery that has dozens of different types of baklava made every day. When Adonis opened, it centralized everything under one roof.

The most striking part of the store is at the centre, a glass-enclosed structure that houses a custom-built pita machine that churns out more than 6,000 pitas on a busy day.

After a month of being offline due to a part malfunction, the pita machine is back up and running. Within a few minutes of my being there on a recent visit, Tawil was greeted by regular customers, praising the store for bringing the machine back to life.

While Adonis is known for its wide array of imported products — olive oil from Lebanon, pistachios from Iran, galia melons and guavas from Egypt — it is most frequented for its flatbreads.

The pita machine is the heart and soul of the store.

“People drive from all over the province to see the machine and to pick up bags and bags of pita,” said Tawil. The store also supplies pitas to hundreds of Metro grocery stores and a variety of restaurants throughout the GTA.

Freshly baked flatbreads, once cooled, are conveniently stacked by the mouth of the machine’s large oven. It is arguably the busiest spot in the entire store where you’ll see shoppers stack their carts with bags of pita, while many others will pause to look at puffed flatbreads emerging on a conveyor belt from the oven’s fiery inferno.

“We host many school kids on tours here. They love it,” said Tawil. The pita production area takes up a large chunk of the store’s footprint, at 1,700-square-feet, and is maintained by a specialized crew. “There are few machines like this in Canada,” said Tawil.

The machine may be complex, but the pita itself is made from a simple recipe of flour, salt, sugar, yeast and water. The pita team is made up of three bakers from Iraq, two of whom are brothers and longtime cooks, and a fourth baker from Afghanistan.

Dough is made in large quantities, rested and plunged into a proofer that punches the dough into palm-sized discs.

The journey starts here as the discs ascend on a conveyor belt, proofing for a second time before plunging into a sheeter that flattens the dough discs. The roller-coaster ride then takes each piece of dough quickly through a device that coats them in a thin layer of flour, and then into a high-heat oven, which bakes them for “seconds,” according to Tawil. They quickly puff up as they leave the oven and move back onto the conveyor belt for cooling.

“The pita separates in the oven and the cooling deflates them, to prevent any condensation when they’re packed,” Tawil said.

While there, I met a couple who drove in from London, Ont., just for the pita. They loaded an entire cart with bags of flatbread over fears that the machine might have another malfunction. The pita freezes very well. “We love having it with some marinated feta cheese and mint,” the woman said.

Another customer who frequents the shop “a few times a week,” prefers to have the pita with shawarma that he orders from the hot counter at the back. Marinated chicken is roasted on a vertical spit and carved into the middle of the pita and then folded in with pickles, lettuce and garlic sauce and then rolled tightly.

“We also serve the pita with whole, fried or grilled fish, which you can order at the fish counter,” said Tawil.

With the machine back online, there’s a steady procession of visitors who quickly make their way through Adonis’s produce section to get their flatbreads.

If you want to see the pitas being made, weekends are best as the machine and crew make them all day long.

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