The 100 Best Bakeries in the United States

Kasama takes its name from the Tagalog word for "together," which tells you something about the whole project. It's a tasting menu restaurant in Wicker Park where a husband-and-wife team reimagines Filipino cuisine with fine dining precision, two Michelin stars, and a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Great Lakes. Traditional preparations get elegant, inventive treatment, and the pastry work is serious enough to hold its own.

A traditional Hmong cross-stitch pattern meaning "home" runs through the whole room, which tells you exactly what Diane Moua is going for. The neighborhood restaurant inside Minneapolis' Food Building blends Hmong-American cooking with a serious pastry program, and the two halves genuinely need each other. Food & Wine named it Restaurant of the Year, and it landed on the New York Times Restaurant List. The sesame balls have their own fan club.

The brick-and-skylight nave of a former bakery on La Brea sets the stage for one of those all-day operations that actually pulls off both halves. Mornings belong to the pastry counter, where the team's James Beard Award-winning work draws lines before the doors open. By evening the open kitchen is running a Southern European Mediterranean menu for a full dining room that never quite empties.

A pink cake frosted with prickly pear buttercream and scattered with sprinkles sets the tone at this bakery from Mariela Camacho, a Food & Wine Best New Chef and James Beard semifinalist. The conchas are airy under a crackly shell, and the coffee drinks lean into the same playful register as everything else. Nothing here is as sweet as it looks, which is the whole trick.

Berlu is a Vietnamese bakery on SE Belmont where everything is gluten- and dairy-free, and the star is a springy green pandan sponge cake so beloved that its portrait decorates the bathroom walls. You can also buy socks printed with its face. The chef won a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific, which tells you he can cook, though the line is mostly there for the cake with the merch.

The beef pho kolache alone explains why this Cambodian-influenced bakery and coffee shop landed on the New York Times' list of best bakeries in the country. Chef Vanarin Kuch, a Top Chef alum and James Beard Outstanding Bakery semifinalist, builds a menu where Southeast Asian flavors drift easily into French, Mexican, and Brazilian territory. The Salty Cambodian latte, finished with condensed milk and sourdough butter, has regulars skipping the cortado for good.

The color-splashed facade in Wynwood is hard to miss, and the line of regulars out front means you won't either. This all-day kosher bakery and cafe runs on naturally leavened breads and pastries, with sandwiches, soups, and salads filling out the menu. The seasonal concha tends to disappear fast. A James Beard nominee for Outstanding Baker, Zak Stern trained on organic farms across Europe before bringing the whole project back home to Miami.

The bagels here are kettle-boiled and hand-rolled, and the owner once won New York's Bagelfest twice, which is its own kind of declaration. This is a counter-order bagel shop with a line out the door and spreads that work for both the plain-schmear traditionalist and whoever orders the avocado toast-but-make-it-a-bagel sandwich. A James Beard nominee two years running, and on Eater's Dallas essentials list. Get there early, or just accept the wait.

The car lift and air pump are still there, which gives this French bakery in a former auto body shop a particular kind of credibility. The laminated pastries are serious, the canelés are delicate, and the seasonal produce finds its way into croissants and Danish that justify the line. A James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Bakery, it has also landed on The New York Times' list of the best bakeries in the country.

The corn cake is not corn: it's sponge coated in piped kernels of corn mousse, and it stops people in their tracks. Lysée is a dessert gallery in the Flatiron where Eunji Lee, a Food & Wine Best New Chef, applies French technique to Korean flavors like yuja and brown rice, then displays the results on lit tables as though daring you to eat them. North America's Best Pastry Chef at the 50 Best, 2026. Go prepared to feel slightly intimidated by a cake.

The horchata cream doughnut sells out early, which tells you everything about the pace of a morning here. Casaema is a daytime cafe in Houston Heights rooted in Mexican foodways, with a pastry case full of conchas and guava-queso empanadas alongside a coffee menu running café de olla lattes and piloncillo chai. The chilaquiles are built on housemade chips with brisket. A James Beard nominee for Best New Restaurant, and a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

A Long Beach panadería where the pastries draw on Mexican and Indigenous baking traditions, Gusto Bread makes a kouign-amann with nixtamalized corn folded into sourdough dough, which tells you everything about how the team approaches the classics. Conchas, multigrain loaves, and seasonal pastries round out the case. A James Beard nominee for Outstanding Bakery, it draws visitors from well outside the neighborhood who planned their morning around it.

Verzênay is a Lincoln Park patisserie where the French classics arrive in textbook form: chocolate eclairs, crackly kouign-amann, a sourdough baguette that's often still warm. It also keeps an apple pie and a mango passionfruit cheesecake in the case, which the French would presumably allow. The Chicago macaron, filled with caramel, popcorn, and cheddar, is a Garrett Popcorn tribute in cookie form. Saturday mornings call for an early alarm.

The line down the block on weekends is a reliable feature, and so is the sign that says they've sold out early. Radio Bakery is a small Greenpoint spot where croissants get shaped like Danishes and filled with whatever's good that month, focaccia sandwiches come stuffed with smoked salmon and cream cheese, and the brown butter corn cake is the thing to grab for later. Frustrating in all the right ways.

D'Andrews is a bakery and cafe on Church Street where the pastry case looks like a jewelry counter that took up baking. There are mousse desserts shaped like fruit, a chocolate cube wearing a white chocolate feather and a bit of gold leaf, and croissants that appear to have nothing to prove. It was a James Beard Outstanding Bakery semifinalist. Expect a line, a lot of phones out first, and forks only afterward.

A Nashville bakery-cafe in 12 South where the cinnamon cookies come roughly the size of a salad plate and the churro croissants are filled with dulce de leche cream. The fast-casual counter up front handles the pastry situation; the cafe in back does soft scrambled eggs with chili crunch and lattes for anyone who secures a seat. Midcentury-sunny room, long lines of people who planned ahead, and beignets that won Nashville Scene's city-wide vote.

Mindy's is a Wicker Park bakery where the menu shifts often enough to keep regulars guessing, running from donuts to pot pies, with the occasional turnover stuffed with mortadella and giardiniera. The bagels get plenty of attention too. The room is tiny and there are only a couple of window seats, so most people end up eating in the car, which is fine, since crumbs are cheaper to vacuum than to explain.

Pasta and vegetables carry most of the weight here, at this bright, sun-flooded Italian restaurant in Logan Square that holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand. The house-made pappardelle and rigatoni keep regulars coming back, but the onion dip with house-made ruffles has become a thing people talk about. A bakery tucked in the back means the pastry situation at the end of a meal is genuinely hard to navigate. The bar program turns heads too, a James Beard semifinalist for hospitality.

The line out the door at 5 p.m. is not a fluke; it's people waiting on the country loaf that Chad Robertson and Elisabeth Prueitt pull from the oven each afternoon. This Mission District bakery and cafe has been rewriting the rules on sourdough since forever, and the morning buns and cream tarts move fast enough that showing up early is less a suggestion than a strategy.

Green chile-jack croissants and elote danishes filled with roasted corn and crema make clear what kind of bakery this is: one that bakes from the region, not the Pinterest board. The Burque Bakehouse is a neighborhood artisan bakery with a farmers-market past and a regular line of locals who apparently have good morning routines. It earned a James Beard Outstanding Bakery nomination in 2024 and a semifinalist nod in 2026.

A flower-strung alley leads to an order window in East Austin, which is a whole vibe before the coffee even arrives. Mercado Sin Nombre is a Mexican coffee shop built around heirloom corn and specialty coffee, with pastries that take the idea seriously, including a biscuit that takes 100 hours to make. A Michelin Bib Gourmand and a James Beard Outstanding Bakery semifinalist, it keeps the name deliberately small so the farmers doing the work stay front and center.

A bakery run by a former artist who, finding no local mills in Oklahoma's wheat belt, simply found a farmer and milled her own grain. The sourdough-heavy menu leans into specials like French onion soup Danishes and ube-blue corn coffee cake, which is either wildly creative or deeply unhinged, depending on your mood. Cat Cox won a James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker in 2025. Open Saturdays, with a line down the block before the doors even open.

The line stretching down the block in North Beach is not a fluke. Butter & Crumble is a pastry and cake shop that built its name on laminated dough, and the croissants are the draw, from a plain version so flaky it barely holds together to cruffins stuffed with seasonal cream. Options rotate often enough that regulars have a reason to come back, which they do, loyally, before the case sells out. A few bar seats exist, but this is a takeout operation at heart.

The baguettes go fast, so regulars grab two. Evergreen is a bakery and butcher shop in Inman Park where naturally leavened bread shares the counter with whole-animal cuts, and the combination makes more sense than it sounds. The vollkornbrot is dense and serious, the croissants are not, and the fermented hamburger buns exist specifically to cradle the beef ground in back. Atlanta was not a bread town; Evergreen is doing something about that.

A wood-fired brick oven anchors this sprawling bakery and cafe in the Mission, where the bread alone draws a line out the door most mornings. The Scandinavian-influenced dining room is airy enough that waiting feels less painful than it sounds. Coffee beans are roasted in-house, pastries lean contemporary, and the sourdough loaves are the kind people carry home on planes. Go for breakfast or lunch and plan to leave with a bag of something.

The bread is the whole philosophy here: Union Loafers is a bakery-turned-full-service restaurant in Botanical Heights where naturally leavened loaves set the tone for everything else on the menu. The pizzas split the difference between New York chew and Neapolitan char, and the sandwiches built on house bread give you a very good reason to show up before dinner. St. Louis-style pizza is conspicuously absent, which some locals treat as a provocation.

The twice-fried bacon has its own reputation in this city, which tells you something about how long the Avila family has been getting things right on East 7th. Joe's is an all-day breakfast shop and Tex-Mex bakery, built-in booths and no pretension, with migas tacos on house-made flour tortillas and a bakery case full of conchas. A 2023 James Beard America's Classics winner, which is the kind of honor a place earns by being itself for decades.

Kaya toast on pillowy bread striped with coconut-pandan jam is the thing people cite first, but the menu at this Asian American bakery on Clement Street rotates enough to keep regulars guessing. Pan de sal buns cradle egg salad with panko-fried veg, and the Basque cheesecake is cut thick enough to feel like a statement. Outdoor seating only, but the line moves. The New York Times and the LA Times both put it on their San Francisco lists.

The Vaucroissant, a lattice croissant stuffed with sausage from Vaucresson's, a venerable Black-owned Seventh Ward institution, is a good place to start understanding what this neighborhood bakery is doing. The chef, a former dancer, bakes with a historian's eye: benne seeds on toffee cookies, cornbread muffins wrapped in their own husks. A 2025 James Beard Emerging Chef nominee, she's built something that tastes like New Orleans and remembers where it came from.

The former Heller's Bakery space now runs all day as a cafe, from morning lattes and egg sandwiches on potato rolls through a pastrami Reuben at lunch and on to dinner plates that get genuinely ambitious: fried halloumi with farro, chicken Milanese with romesco, ravioli with mushrooms and hazelnuts. The kitchen leans into fermentation and seasonal quirks in a way that keeps things interesting without making you feel like you're being lectured. Michelin Bib Gourmand.

Blue velvet banquettes, wood-paneled columns, and vintage frescoes sit just off a casino floor that couldn't be further from Paris, which is exactly the joke Thomas Keller seems happy to lean into. Bouchon is a classic French brasserie where the staff wear bow ties and the cooking runs to escargots and crème brûlée done with care. The room transports; the slot machines do not.

A former boat repair shop on the canal, now doing the Lord's work with cardamom croissants and Japanese melonpan. Saint Bread is a bakery with a full menu organized, with some nerve, by how many slices of bread your order contains. The "No Bread" section includes okonomiyaki, which tells you the kitchen has opinions. A James Beard Semifinalist for Outstanding Bakery, and the New York Times put it on their short list of top U.S. bakeries.

The smell hits you before you reach the counter, which is exactly how a bakery should announce itself. Love Croissants is a tiny counter shop in Midtown turning out butter croissants, layered pastries with sweet and savory fillings, and tarts, plus a rotating monthly croissant flavor that keeps regulars checking back. The chef started baking as a personal reset, which is an origin story that makes the whole operation feel a little more human.

1228 Main is a daytime bakery and cafe in the Arts District where the pastry case gets the best light in the building. The laminated stuff is the draw, from lemon cruffins to crème brûlée croissants, and most people could call it breakfast with just a cappuccino. There's also a croissant sandwich with gruyère, avocado, and jalapeño aioli. It's part of the Wolfgang Puck group, which explains the discipline.

The smoked fish counter on Orchard Street has been an institution since forever, and Russ & Daughters is the appetizing shop New York trots out whenever it needs to prove a point. White-jacketed servers, a pristine deli case, egg creams, bagels, and Scottish salmon done multiple ways. The Michelin Bib Gourmand nod keeps it honest: the food is the whole point, and the regulars at the counter have known that for years.

A French bakery tucked into a Parker strip mall, Poulette turns out croissants, kouign-amann, éclairs, brioche, and macarons from a pastry case that gets restocked daily and emptied fast. The team behind it spent years in serious kitchens, and the technique shows without the attitude. The New York Times named it among the country's top bakeries, and it's landed James Beard nominations for Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker.

The croissants here are laminated so precisely that the layers curl back on themselves like something from a geometry class, and then a breakfast sandwich gets stacked on top. Loaf Lounge is an all-day cafe where a pastry-and-savory team splits duties, one side producing sourdough and oatmeal cream pies, the other composing serious sandwiches. The chocolate cake the team made for "The Bear" has taken on a life of its own, which tracks.

Za'atar and labneh croissants sit next to a chocolate seven-spice cruffin in the pastry case, which tells you most of what you need to know about this fast-casual Levantine café in Ivy City. French technique carries the baked goods, while the kitchen leans into the Middle East for everything else. Evenings bring charcoal-grilled kebabs and meze from an open hearth, so the place quietly shapeshifts between breakfast spot and dinner counter without making a fuss about it.

The quiche arrives as though it's never heard of the stodgy version you've had before, light and trembling where quiche has no business being either. MÅURICE is a French-leaning pastry luncheonette from chef Kristen Murray, drawing from French and Norwegian traditions for a small menu of smørbrød, soups, and sweets. The black pepper cheesecake has its own local mythology. A cold bottle of white at midday in downtown Portland, and nowhere else quite like it.

Every bagel here comes out hot, and that's non-negotiable. This Greenwich Village bagel shop forgoes the plastic knife entirely: you rip, you dip into one of several cream cheeses pulled straight from the fridge, and that's the deal. The bagels run smaller and darker than the New York standard, which will either bother you or convert you. The New York Times and Eater have both put it on their short lists, so the line is rarely short.

The cachito, a soft Venezuelan ham-and-cheese roll, is as good a reason as any to find your way to this Venezuelan bakery tucked into Doral. The team blends a Latin sensibility with French-style bread baking, so golfeados and pastelitos sit alongside proper croissants without anyone making a fuss about it. A 2024 James Beard nominee for Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker. Bring cash and a little patience; the line tends to have opinions.

Momo Cafe is the Japanese bakery counter tucked inside Momonoki, and it takes croissants seriously enough to offer them filled with cream, coiled into circles, or just classically layered. The menu rotates, so a savory one with onion, gruyere, and rosemary might be there or might be a memory. Matcha lattes and mochi donuts round things out. A small alcove upstairs lets you eat while watching the ramen crowd below.

The only all-local butcher case on O'ahu anchors this Kaimuki bakery and butcher shop, where the counter swings between venison chops and char siu croissants without missing a beat. House-made Spam shares space with liliko'i baklava danish, and the sandwich of the day rotates with whatever the butcher is working with. A James Beard Outstanding Bakery semifinalist, it's the rare spot where the lard in your almond cookie is a selling point, not a secret.

Specials scrawled on brown paper rolls and a pastry case worth a long look set the tone at this low-key bakery and brunch cafe on McDowell Road. The kitchen leans on local ingredients, and the menu changes with what's good, so regulars learn to check the case before committing. Patio seating in the Phoenix sunshine makes the wait easier. Easy to miss from the street, which keeps it mercifully manageable on a weekend morning.

A bagel shop in Temescal that quietly reframes the whole New York-versus-everywhere-else argument by not entering it. Poppy turns out the classics, lox, whitefish, schmears of every persuasion, but the open-face seasonal veg sandwich is the point: California produce stacked on a proper bagel, finished with salsa macha for heat. Bon Appétit named it among the very best bagels in the country, New York included.

The focaccia is baked in-house, which explains why the bread alone prompts takeaway orders. Marty's is a neighborhood sandwich shop in Northeast Minneapolis that spent a couple of years as a pop-up before finding a permanent home, and the menu still has that carefully considered quality. Chicken salad, a BLT with local bacon, a salami and prosciutto situation with fennel slaw. The breakfast sandwich stacked with hash browns has developed its own following.

El Bagel is a Biscayne Boulevard bagel shop where the line out the door is part of the architecture. The bagels come out blistered and bubbly on the crust, then get stuffed and wrapped tight in parchment, which is how a Miami bagel ends up with guava in it. Bon Appétit once declared these among the very best in the country, outside New York, a distinction New Yorkers will note and then ignore.

A U-shaped bar anchors this Danish coffee shop, where streamlined taps for cold drinks share space with a proper V60 setup and a counter lined with pastries worth stopping for. La Cabra built a following in Copenhagen before planting roots on the Lower East Side, and the East Village original still draws a crowd that treats croissants and a carefully pulled espresso as a reasonable reason to leave the house.

The bread lineup at this Israeli bakery in Rice Village runs from sourdough to shakshuka pastries to burekitas, the small savory hand pies the team grew up eating in Israel. It's a bright, picturesque café with outdoor seating, connected to the same group behind Doris Metropolitan and Hamsa. A 2025 James Beard Outstanding Restaurateur semifinalist, it draws the kind of Saturday morning crowd that treats a bakery run like a serious errand.

Mochi crullers coated in coconut caramel and purple ube brioche doughnuts tell you quickly what kind of bakery this is. Rosie Nguyen draws on Vietnamese heritage and a restless pastry imagination to fill the Woodley Park counter with things you won't find anywhere obvious nearby. The space is roomier than you might expect, and weekend slots go fast enough that advance ordering is the move.

Dolly's is a bakery-cafe on Rockaway Avenue that also runs a soft serve window, and the soft serve is where the strangeness lives. The blueberry pancake one comes with an actual pancake on top, so you can eat the dessert and its inspiration side by side like a tiny experiment. Flavors rotate through cereal and banana pudding, and it's all cheap, casual, and eaten standing up. The Infatuation has listed it among the best bakeries in NYC.

Lost Larson is a Scandinavian-leaning bakery and cafe in Andersonville that mills its own flour, which sounds like a bit until you see the loaves. The pastry case looks like a Great British Baking Show finale, all tarts, cardamom buns, and savory croissants. Order at the counter, grab a sandwich or an afternoon bun with Earl Grey sugar, and expect to linger over coffee longer than you planned.

Sugar Moon is a takeout-only bakery in Logan Square, so there's no table to claim, just a sidewalk line that starts forming a good half hour before the 9am opening and doesn't care about the weather. The reward is a curried cauliflower croissant or a Nutella-pear brioche bun, plus scones that crumble the way scones should. Pastry runs cheap, the wait costs you a Saturday morning, and it's been named among the country's favorite bakeries by The Infatuation.

Babychan is a Japanese bakery on the ground floor of a Germantown condo building, done up in walnut and Japanese art, which is more design effort than most places put into the thing you eat standing up. The case runs to sesame swiss rolls, salmon onigiri, and milk bread stuffed with cream cheese. It was a James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurateur, and the pastries sell out early, so arrive at opening.

Bar Tutto is an all-day Italian cafe from Top Chef winner Joe Flamm, which means you can start with a pastry and an egg sandwich and, if the day cooperates, still be there when the handmade pasta shows up. The wood-fired grill handles razor clams and prawns with Calabrian chile, and the Fernet-leaning cocktail list suggests the staff has opinions about digestivi. It was a James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurateur.

Kouign-amann and cruffins sharing a case with proper baguettes and macarons sets the tone fast at this French patisserie. The laminated dough is serious, the espresso keeps things moving, and the whole operation closes by two, so the morning crowd treats it with the urgency the pastries deserve. A James Beard Outstanding Bakery semifinalist, JL Patisserie is what happens when French technique finds a permanent home in the desert.

Warda Bouguettaya won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2022, and her understated cafe on West Alexandrine is where that makes sense. Warda Pâtisserie is the kind of patisserie where the tarts are architectural and the bread smells like someone actually cares. Bistro seating if you want to linger over a latte, takeaway boxes if you don't. Detroit didn't exactly have a shortage of opinions, but this one is quiet and confident about it.

The sweet corn bibingka is topped with what looks like white chocolate but turns out to be Cheddar, which tells you everything about how this all-day cafe operates. Mornings run on Asian-American pastries and a line out the door; evenings pivot to Japanese-inflected yōshoku cooking. The team earned a James Beard nomination for Outstanding Pastry Chef and a nod from Bon Appétit's best new restaurants list, and the Cincinnati chili ramen has developed its own local mythology.