Mohamed Smaili is an unabashed perfectionist.
The night before his new bakery, Mia Dessert Bar, opened in Sylvania, he slept on a cot in the back of the store at 4024 N. Holland Sylvania Rd. He shouldn’t have worried about opening day.
“We sold out of mostly everything,” Mr. Smaili said.
After customers cleaned out the cases of croissants and cookies, Nur Smaili took her exhausted husband home and they collapsed.
“It was a hard day, but a satisfying day,” she said.
Since the June 2 grand opening, Mr. Smaili has settled into a routine that starts before sunrise.
“It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it,” he said. “I come in at 3 a.m. to bake everything fresh, every day.
The menu is fluid, changing at his whim.
“I get bored doing the same stuff, even though it’s easier to do it that way,” said Mr. Smaili, who earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in 2017 from the University of Toledo. “I keep the main stuff that people really love, so that people who haven’t tried it yet can try it, like the chocolate and pistachio.”
Some items have proved to be so popular, they will most likely always be available. Croissants with chocolate cream, pistachio, or pistachio and raspberry fly off the racks each morning, he said. Some of his other unusual flavored croissants are black sesame and tropical with white chocolate, guava, mango, and passion fruit.
Macarons will always have a spot in the dessert case. They also have some decidedly different flavors: Peanut butter and jelly, coffee, and rhubarb white chocolate.
“My favorite is when people who have never tried something, try it. A lot of things I put out are flavors that people around here probably haven’t tried,” he said.
Mr. Smaili enjoys the challenge of making the macaron.
“There’s so many factors that can make them not turn out right — overmixing it, undermixing it, if you leave them baking too long, if you don’t bake them long enough, if the temperature is just a little too low, it won’t work,” he said.
“It’s similar to the croissants, when I don’t get it right away, it’s something I’ve just got to get,” Mr. Smaili said. “I feel like I’ve got to get it perfect. ... Anything I start, I have to get very good at it.”
He is about to debut a macaron ice cream sandwich, with ice cream that is also made from scratch.
The knafeh cookie, a cheese-based dessert, is another dessert in demand.
“I mixed two versions of it into a cookie,” Mr. Smaili said.
His family is from Lebanon and that background has some bearing on the baking. Most of the expertise comes from social media.
“I taught myself everything. I feel you can learn a lot online. If you really care about it, you’ll learn it, and you can find the information,” said the 2012 Sylvania Southview High School graduate.
The Smailis had known each other since they were teenagers and reconnected in 2017. She is a medical lab scientist and helps at the bakery.
“The first time I started baking was to impress her,” Mr. Smaili said of Nur.
They had been dating long distance — often watching cooking shows together over FaceTime — and she decided to come to Toledo to visit for a week.
“Basically all the time, he was just baking the cake and worrying on it,” she recalled.
The dessert bar is named after the couple’s white Persian cat, who likes to keep a watchful eye on Mr. Smaili when he bakes in their Laskey Road apartment. Sometimes she slinks up the kitchen table to peer up at him — that image became the Mia Dessert Bar logo.
The first baking for customers started in the apartment where Mr. Smaili began catering for weddings and engagement parties. With one oven, it wasn’t ideal, he said. Once, there were 400 macarons stacked in and around the kitchen.
He started looking for a storefront.
“I just knew I had the support, so that’s why I felt comfortable opening this space,” Mr. Smaili said, citing his social media following.
The Oak Tree Shopping Center gets a lot of traffic, with a pizza place, bagel restaurant, salon, and tutoring office, he said.
For more information, visit facebook.com/MIA.DessertBar1.
First Published July 5, 2024, 8:41 p.m.
