Toronto Laundromat Review #1 — Bruno’s Laundromat & Primrose Bagel
Hi, we’re Dave and Anne-Marie: two employed, full-time professionals living in downtown Toronto, so obviously we have 2 roommates and no onsite laundry! That’s why every Saturday we packed up all the fabric in our apartment and dragged it to the nearest Laundromat, then went to the café next door for coffee and breakfast. For over a year a healthy if boring routine settled in and then: disaster. The café closed.
Reeling from the loss and severely under-caffeinated, we hatched a scheme while waiting for the bath mats to dry: destination Laundromats. We would pick a breakfast, then pick a nearby laundromat and write up our experience for the benefit of… well having something to do while bath mats dry (we like them THICK).
This week, we’re gonna do laundry at Bruno’s Laundromat (314 Oakwood Ave) and grab breakfast across the street at Primrose Bagel (317A Oakwood Ave)
Setting aside how ridiculous this sentence is… Bruno’s and Primrose Bagel makes for a real fancy time at the laundromat.
First, Bruno’s has a ramp and two wee staircases leading to a single door so you get to start the whole thing with a free puzzle to do while carrying an aaaaaaalmost broken basket fulla laundry you really should replace.
Once you’re in, Bruno’s turns out to be a more maze-style laundromat than we‘re used to. It’s laid out in an “H” shape with dryers in the back, washers up front and vending and change machines in the bridge in between. This really works out well as having a lotta nooks means you can really stake a claim to one of them, a boon if you are 2 weirdos inexplicably taking pictures of the detergent machine.
Our stuff took up one small and two medium washers, getting change seemed convenient until we found golden arcade tokens mixed in with our quarters and loonies. Turns out there are Bruno Bucks? Tokens are worth a quarter in all washers and dryers, but so are like… just regular quarters… which the change machine also gives? So if you visit you have been warned about the Bruno bucks, be sure to feed all of them into your washers and top up with legal tender, which can still be used outside of Bruno’s and Dave and Busters.
With our laundry locked in we proceed to jaywalk — like the lawless rebels we are — directly across the street to Primrose Bagel. We won’t drone on as this is about the laundry but: it is very cool, expect a line. People with tattoos wearing aprons and toques are there making the shit out of New York-ish bagels and tasty spreads with their hands and charging what that costs. It’s awesome and they have drip coffee that does not suck. If a bespoke smoked fish bagel experience is not your speed though, Primrose is next to a convenience store that has snack cakes and coffee for a somewhat grittier and — let’s be real — way cheaper laundry day.
We got lox and chive cream cheese on a rock salt bagel and an egg and cheese on sesame and some latkes, which they gave us sour cream and applesauce for without us asking which we thank you for, hip young bagel people. The bagels are very good, the lox is insanely tasty and the egg and cheese was good, but shoulda been another lox in retrospect.
Back at Bruno’s we ran into a snag, the machine we set to hot was full of ice cold towels and the machine we set to cold was full of clothes that were steaming like cartoon bread coming out of an oven. Nothing ran however and being honest that might have been user error, the users having been in a bagel frenzy and baffled by the Bruno Bucks situation at the time.
We used one of the many (all working!) wheelie carts to transfer to the dryers (25 cents or one Bruno Buck for 4 minutes) and settled in on a nice wooden bench for our waiting and almost immediately stumbled into our first entitled nitpick: No Wi-fi! Boo-hoo, avocado toast et cetera. Instead there were several TVs showing a CBC kids’ show about… like a ballet school we think? It was a lotta young people in workout clothes carrying gym bags intercut with scheming.
After hotspotting Anne-Marie’s phone so we could take some notes we discovered that yes, Bruno’s has a bathroom! Be warned however that gaining access to said bathroom involves a short Joseph Campbell-style hero’s journey. First you must obtain a key from a man in an earflap hat — perhaps Bruno himself? — and then travel through a storage closet and down a flight of terrifying stairs to a toilet that has water in it but does not flush. On the Toronto scale of bathrooms, it is a C+.
Conveniently the toilet quest mostly covered the 28 minutes it took to dry our stuff in 3 dryers, which is wicked fast. You can live however you like, of course, but we are firm laundromat folders in our home. As proud foldy-folk we LOVE Bruno’s. There are multiple enormous tiled counter things dotted through the joint and we can say that having folded laundry on narrow tables, the tops of washers, and as a last resort our own chests and tummies: these counters were goddamn luxurious.
With our laundry folded we left Bruno’s and Primrose behind us having had a charming time, a lovely breakfast and heartily recommend both establishments to your attention. We will end, as we hope to with most of these reviews, with some immaturely comical signage:
The Breakdown:
Washers — So many, in regular, large and gargantuan sizes.
Dryers — 2 banks of 14 of those big suckers
Vending — 2 food machines, shocking number of detergent machines
Wifi — Nope, budget some data plan
ATM — Yup
Change Machine — bill changer and change machine that spits out quarters, loonies and… tokens? Like arcade tokens, but all the games are washing your clothes. Bruno Bucks!
Place to sit — Benches, chairs, BUT NOT ON THE MACHINES according to signage.
Place to fold — Huge tiled counters, the kind you didn’t know you dreamed about.
Special something — So many plants!
