Best Bakery

1. Porto’s Bakery and Café

7640 Beach Blvd., Buena Park; www.portosbakery.com

Porto’s Bakery and Café is a favorite place to enjoy bakery treats such as tarts, croissants, cakes, breads, as well as Cuban specialties like ham croquettes, empanadas and potato balls.

The communist takeover of Cuba decades ago partially led to the creation of Porto’s, which now has stores in Buena Park, Glendale, Burbank, Downey, West Covina and Northridge. Rosa Porto, a Cuban refugee, opened her first Porto’s Bakery in Echo Park. She’d previously been selling her homemade cakes to friends and relatives out of her home while trying to make ends meet in America. Rosa Porto passed away in 2019, but her recipes remain a part of the successful bakery business that her children and grandkids now run.

Growing up in Cuba, Rosa loved the kitchen at home, filled with the scents of cinnamon, sugar and vanilla as her mother baked with recipes she’d brought from her homeland, the Galicia region of Spain. After Cuba fell to communism, Rosa and her family decided to leave Cuba; Rosa Porto was fired from her job and her husband was taken to a labor camp. Rosa began baking and selling cakes to neighbors and friends there to support her family, a skill she took with her when the family immigrated to California. Later, Porto’s Bakery and Café was born.

In 2016, Porto’s was named one of Yelp’s “Top 100 Places to Eat in the U.S.”

NICK AGRO, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER Customers filled the shop when Porto’s opened its Buena Park location in 2017. Today, there are six locations of the Cuban bakery.

– Amy Bentley

2. 85°C Bakery Café

Multiple locations; www.85cbakerycafe.com

From Taiwan to California, 85°C Bakery Café continues to expand with the opening of a distribution center in Buena Park in March of this year. The business — a huge and popular chain in Taiwan that launched in 2004 and now has over 1,000 locations worldwide — first came to the United States in 2008 with the opening of a café in Irvine. 85°C Bakery Café has additional Orange County stores in Fountain Valley, Garden Grove, Orange and Tustin.

If you’re wondering where the name comes from, here’s what the chain’s website says: “The idea that the perfect brewing temperature for espresso coffee is 85° Celsius. For us, the name symbolizes our devotion to provide coffee, breads and cakes of the highest quality to every guest.” 85°C Bakery Café stores offer a variety of more than 50 freshly baked breads, cakes and Danishes, many of them exotic and filled with treats like blueberry cream cheese, chocolate chips or coconut and raisins.

In 1955, Poul Johansen, an immigrant from Denmark, opened his first bakery in the city of Orange, and the bakery became a popular tradition for many local families. Ayliz Guclu is the third and current owner — she reopened Poul’s in 2012 after it closed the previous year — and clearly the beloved longtime bakery has retained a loyal following.

“Being in business 67 years, we have followers for decades. Generation after generation, people come to us,” Guclu said. “It’s like a tradition. We do offer a lot of different products that are not found in a normal bakery,” said Guclu, who still offers many of Poul’s old favorite menu items as well as some new ones, she added.

Custom-made cakes for special occasions, cannolis, gourmet cookies, pastries and Danishes are just some of the bakery treats at Poul’s. Other popular specialties include marzipan bonbons, cupcakes, petit fours, brownies, cream puffs and cake pops. Poul’s Swedish Princess cake and their colorful unicorn cake are favorites for birthdays and children’s parties.

3. Poul’s Bakery

2950 Grace Lane, Suite A, Costa Mesa; 714-532-5101 www.pouls-bakery.com