The Best Bakeries in the United States

A tiny neighborhood bakery in Camden where the croissant dough, made with local flour and butter, shows up in everything: cinnamon buns, kouign-amanns, loaves, and savory Danishes when the season allows. The menu rotates with what's available, so summer brings heirloom tomato Danishes and wild blueberry hand pies, while ham and cheese croissants and coriander-lemon morning buns keep things interesting the rest of the year. The New York Times named it among the top bakeries in the country.

Rapid City has a croissant problem, and this downtown sourdough bakery in a historic brick building is largely responsible. The self-taught baker behind it started as a cottage operation before demand forced the move to a proper storefront. The pull is sourdough loaves and sourdough croissants, made by someone who openly credits YouTube as his culinary school, which is either refreshing or unsettling depending on how you feel about credentials.

The coyota is a Sonoran pastry that looks roughly like a flying saucer, which is a good start. Tutuli bakes them in fillings like cajeta, hibiscus, and guava, and the flavors open up properly once you toast one. They're somewhere between a cookie and an empanada, and they turn up at coffee shops around the Bay. The San Francisco Chronicle named Tutuli among the best bakeries in the Bay Area.

Yeast is a small East Nashville bakery built around the kolache, the Czech pastry Texans have been quietly keeping to themselves. The sweet Bohemian versions come filled with fruit, and the savory Tex-Czech ones run toward sausage, cheddar, and jalapeño. A few tables and a tiny patio exist, but the move is to carry your bag across the street to East Park and eat on a bench like a person with nowhere to be.

The Coco Puffs in the bakery case are cream puffs frosted on top, not cereal, and locals have been devoted to them for generations. This outpost of a Honolulu institution sits in a bright, open-air space at the top of International Market Place, which feels a little glossy for a diner that trades in pancakes, Denver omelets, and mochi donuts. The food is the same as the original, which is exactly the point.

A palm-sized guava tart with finger limes that pop against smooth guava cream put this bakery on the New York Times list of the year's best desserts across the country. Sol Bakery is a neighborhood bakery on Hayes Street where the pastry work tilts toward barely sweet, bright, and texturally alive. The guava tart alone has earned a following before the permanent doors were barely open.

Cadinho is a sunny Portuguese bakery and cafe in McKinley Park, and the tarts are the whole conversation. There's the pastel de nata, vanilla-scented custard in flaky pastry, sometimes wearing a little chocolate shell like a tiny hat. There are also palm-sized passionfruit pies with a crust that gives up immediately. The other baked goods are perfectly pleasant, but you'll see people leave carrying a box of tarts and nothing else.

Good Ambler is a Fulton Market bakery tucked into the lobby of a snack-food conglomerate's headquarters, and the pastry case has the good manners not to mention it. Macarons, kouign-amann, petit gateau and handmade chocolates line up behind the glass, but the plain croissant is the one doing the heavy lifting. It's a counter-service stop, so nobody needs a reservation or a dress code.

A bagel shop and deli in suburban Des Moines with a New York fixation, right down to sandwiches named for boroughs and landmarks. The bagels and bialys are baked in-house, the cream cheeses come blended with things like Sriracha and bacon, and the Bronx, a BLT with Sriracha cream cheese and banana peppers, suggests the kitchen isn't playing it safe. Espresso drinks and fresh-squeezed juices round it out for the morning crowd.

Au Levain is a North Center bakery and cafe where the morning rush is a mix of couples nursing coffee, commuters grabbing a pastry on the way to work, and parents running crumb containment while a toddler dismantles a pain au chocolate. The croissants are the draw, with a honeycomb interior, and the sourdough english muffin breakfast sandwich has a way of lingering in your thoughts around dinnertime. It's on The Infatuation's list of Chicago's best bakeries.

A strip mall bakery wedged between a boxing gym and a bar on Allisonville Road, which is somehow the right neighborhood for ginger molasses monkey bread and buttery pain au chocolat. The chef left a D.C. political career for New Orleans patisserie training before landing in Indianapolis, and the French technique comes through in pastries that have no business being this precise in a parking lot. Saturdays go fast.

The old-fashioned blueberry cake donut is the thing people make a specific trip for, and the shop has been turning them out near Trolley Square for longer than most of its regulars have been alive. This is a classic donut counter, cash-and-carry, nothing fussy, with apple fritters and cinnamon rolls alongside daily new flavors for anyone whose loyalty hasn't already been claimed by the blueberry cake.

This is a casual Logan Square counter where the name is the entire menu philosophy: pie and biscuits, no further questions. The biscuits come big and a little crisp, with butter inside and more butter on the side, plus seasonal jam in case that felt like too little butter. The pies rotate through flavors like apple cider donut and German chocolate, by the slice or whole, and eating one before noon is an option nobody will stop you from taking.

This is a small counter-service bakery in Greater Grand Crossing where the cakes are sold by the slice, so you can sample the whole case without committing to a wedding order. The caramel cake is the one people talk about, with light, open layers frosted so neatly it looks like a surveyor was involved. Cheesecake, pies, and cupcakes crowd the case too, and the line tends to move with the focus of people who already know their order.

This is an old-school Chinatown bakery on Wentworth where the pastry case does all the talking and the register takes only cash, so bring some. The baked BBQ pork buns are soft and fluffy, the sesame balls and egg tarts are the other usual suspects, and the egg tart crust flakes enough that you should check a mirror before rejoining society. Everything is made fresh daily, and a few dollars buys a bag.

Community Loaves is a neighborhood bakery and cafe in Murray Hill, run out of a space with creaky hardwood floors and the steady smell of sourdough. Inside seating is limited, so most people end up at the garden tables, where the local cats make their rounds like unpaid hosts. It's a low-key counter-service stop, and the egg sandwich takes honey mustard and pickles if you ask.

A sea-monster mural by Indy artist C.S. Stanley watches over the pastry case at this neighborhood bakehouse, which a team of five local bakers opened together and never looked back. The porridge sourdough and croissants have drawn a following, and the lunch sandwiches and coffee give people an excuse to linger. Strawberry-guava Danish and pretzel croissants make the decision about what to order harder than it needs to be.

This is a Pilsen panadería where you grab a tray and a pair of tongs at the door, which makes you feel briefly like you work there. The shelves of Mexican pan dulce run from cocoa-dusted conchas to molasses-heavy marranitos, and a dozen kinds of tortillas, spinach and black bean jalapeño among them, cover the savory side. Nothing costs much, so you'll leave with far more than you planned.

Pierrot Gourmet is a French bakery-cafe attached to the Peninsula Hotel, which means it's the one place in that building where nobody asks you to dress up. Grab a seat among the brunching tourists if you like, but the to-go line is where the flaky chocolate croissants, hefty cinnamon rolls, and tarts shaped like chrysanthemums are moving. The Infatuation includes it on its Chicago bakeries list.

This is the bakery that quietly supplies the bread for The Publican and its sibling meat counter, with a small storefront attached for the rest of us. Pastries start at 7am, the loaves land around 9, and the sourdough comes with a crust that puts up a fight. There's nowhere to sit, so you buy more than you meant to and eat a croissant in the car like a person with a plan.

Sarima is a small bakery that shares a room with a burger chain, which is the kind of living arrangement that sounds like a sitcom premise. The pastries mix Filipino and Indian flavors, so the donuts come filled with calamansi and shrikhand cream, and the cookies borrow from kaju katli. There are a few tables, but most people treat it as a grab-and-go morning stop before work.

A bakery in Old Redford built entirely around one vegetable, which sounds like a stunt until you see the display case: sweet potato pie, cheesecake, cookies, ice cream, Belgian waffles, grits, cornbread, and on. The whole project is a quiet tribute to George Washington Carver and his cataloguing of the sweet potato's uses. Order ahead online if you'd rather browse than queue, and don't skip the black-eyed pea and collard green soup.

Sweet Theory is a small vegan bakery that doesn't make a big deal of being vegan, which feels like a relief. The donuts come in small batches and tend to sell out, in flavors like lavender blood orange. The biscuits anchor a short sandwich menu, including one stacked with white bean sausage and coconut bacon. There are one or two tables, so you'll be eating this in your car like an adult.

A bakery in Mountain View that bakes sesame rolls and Dutch crunch bread exclusively for the Rōzmary Kitchen popup, which sets up here on Fridays. The sandwiches are the draw: the Southern Peach pairs turkey and pimento cheese against sweet pickled peaches, and the Italian cured meat options are just as good. The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the Bay Area's best sandwich spots, which tracks.

Sixties decor and biscuits are the whole agenda at this kitschy East Austin cafe. The brick-and-mortar on East 12th is the sit-down sibling to a food truck, and it earns its slow-brunch crowd with diner coffee that won't punish you and biscuits that split into sweet and savory directions depending on your mood. A place designed for lingering, which, in a city that keeps speeding up, is a minor act of defiance.