The best bakeries in Los Angeles

Best for: Bread loaves, croissants, morning buns, cookies, hand pies

Roxana Jullapat and Daniel Mattern’s daytime-only bakery and café makes some of the best baked goods in town, including bread made with locally sourced heirloom grain. The rustic loaves have even made Jullapat—the pastry chef half of the duo—famous nationwide via her cookbook, Mother Grains. Beyond bread, Friends & Family also makes pastries, quiche and cookies, and the brunch menu is no slouch, either. Buckwheat pancakes and olive-oil–fried eggs are worth savoring from the sunny spot in East Hollywood, but we’re also more than content grabbing a quick hand pie and some Danishes. Our words of advice? Order a little of everything, no matter your time limitations, and grab a few pastries for later, too. You’ll be glad you did.

Best for: Pan dulce

Since 1952, this Boyle Heights institution has served some of the city’s best pan dulce. While their iconic crunchy-sweet conchas—as well as the tamales—have kept Angelenos coming back for decades, La Mascota also makes great wedding cookies, flan and bolillos (a shorter, savory bread related to the baguette). The extensive pan dulce selection also includes adorable puerquitos (pork-shaped cookies made with piloncillo, or raw cane sugar), sugar-dusted gusanos (sweet bread rolls) and a host of other traditional Mexican goodies worth adding to your pastry box.

Tantalizingly located across the way from Gold’s Gym, you can usually spot this upscale Venice deli and bakery from the line snaking out the door on weekends. Unlike Gjelina Group’s eponymous original on nearby Abbot Kinney, this sister spot offers plenty of take-home baked goods, including a standout loaf studded with olives. On the sweet side, slices of fruit are folded into sugar-glazed dough for a morning indulgence; pistachio dust tops gloriously flaky croissants; and there’s farmers’ market fruit woven into anything you can imagine. The bread, while pricey, is some of the best in town, and with sliced fish, jarred goods and other accoutrements, you’ll have a spread for days.

Since 2017, this modern patisserie along Sawtelle Boulevard has crafted the most beautiful (and delicious) French confections in town. Made with high-quality ingredients like Madagascar vanilla and Gianduja chocolate, these colorful, painstakingly crafted desserts taste as good as they look. Beyond ultra-pretty patisseries, Artelice also makes tarts, eclairs, macarons and croissants, both sweet and savory. Best of all, a newer location in Burbank has brought Artelice’s edible works of art to major swathes of L.A.—and trust us, these works of art are worth the schlep.

With four locations (Venice, North Hollywood, Hollywood and Pasadena), Superba’s baked-goods empire has grown from its original tiny Westside outpost—and for that we are glad. The more expansive all-day cafés in Venice and Hollywood offer toasts, salads and sandwiches, while the coffee-oriented outposts in NoHo and Pasadena serve a smaller selection of food, including Superba’s standout tartines. But every location’s pastry case comes stuffed with the likes of croissants, citrus-zested cinnamon buns, scones, cookies and more—all worth an order (or a few orders; good luck staying away from these spots).

Best for: cookies

If you’re a Westside cookie lover, there’s no better place in town than—unexpectedly—the United Oil gas station on National Boulevard, where you’ll find Zooies inside the We Got It! convenience store. There’s a dizzying number of cookies and dessert bars on offer, including at least three different twists on chocolate chip: Chewie, brown butter and Gooie (the most popular, and our recommendation for first-timers). Although you may need to call for a preorder, Zooies even offers paleo, vegan and gluten-free chocolate chip cookies, as well as a sugar-free cookie geared towards diabetics. Elsewhere in the glass display, you’ll also find more whimsical cookies dreamt up by head baker Arezou Appel, including a s’mores cookie topped with burnt marshmallow, fruity delights like strawberry shortcake and even a baklava-inspired cookie topped with dusted pistachios.

Named for its prodigal young baker, this tiny bakery next door to pizza-focused Ghisallo and Layla Bagels makes some of freshest, best-tasting bread on the Westside. Seeded sourdough, braided challah, marbled rye and a stunning olive-stuffed fougasse—Jyan Isaan Horowitz has taken the skills he picked up at Gjusta and crafted a breadmaking style that’s entirely his own. For sweet tooths, he also makes plush cinnamon raisin brioche and chocolate babka. While Jyan Isaac often sells out early, you can often find a handful of loaves available for sale next door at Ghisallo, and the bakery also pops up at the Venice, Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades and Larchmont farmers’ markets.

Best for: Danish bread and pastries, princess cake

Open early Wednesday through Sunday, with plenty of hot coffee in tow, this Westside bakery is a great way to start your morning off right. Everything is light, well-made and affordable, at least relative to the most options on this list. Plus, Copenhagen Pastry is one of the city’s only traditional Danish bakeries, so you know you’re getting the good stuff. On your first visit, you’ll probably want to eat everything in sight: the fruit-filled spandauers (a.k.a. Danishes), the braided cinnamon rolls, the macaroons, the nougat crowns straight out of the oven. The kringle, filled with almond paste and custard, is a must-try, though you really can’t go wrong with anything behind the case. For special occasions, Copenhagen offers a few cakes, including a hard-to-find Swedish princess cake made with housemade raspberry jam, vanilla custard and sponge cake.

Best for: Cinnamon rolls

We scoured the city for amazing cinnamon rolls, and while the enormous cream cheese-slathered version at Lodge Bread has its merits, we’ve yet to find a better version than Christopher Federici’s Gooey Center Bakery. Fluffy, soft and coated in just the right amount of frosting, these buns are worth chasing across town. Best of all, they happen to be plant-based—which means the most consistent place you’ll find them is at North Hollywood’s Vegan Exchange every Sunday. On various days of the week, Federici also hands off a few buns to cafés in Echo Park (Canyon Coffee), Burbank (Romancing the Bean, Tansy), Eagle Rock (Muddy Paw) and Pasadena (Lavender and Honey). To find out where these buns will pop up next, follow Gooey Center on Instagram.

Best for: Pan dulce

If a trip to Boyle Heights’ La Mascota isn’t in the cards, this local bakery and café chain serves delicious Mexican pan dulce from 12 convenient locations, including outposts in Santa Monica and Hollywood. The signature seashell pattern conchas, fruit-filled sugary taquitos and flaky, buttery orejas (also known as palmiers) are worth grabbing for an afternoon pick-me-up. Don’t miss out on their housemade champurrado—a masa-thickened hot chocolate—or, if you need a jolt of caffeine, La Monarca’s signature café de olla, which uses organic coffee beans, Mexican cinnamon and brown sugar.

From an Instagram bakery operation to one of L.A.’s favorite vegan bakeries, Just What I Kneaded is now known citywide for its delicious plant-based cakes, cookies and pies. (Plus, many of them are gluten-free!) Self-taught baker Justine Hernandez whips up entirely plant-based scones, cookies, cinnamon rolls and more from a Frogtown brick-and-mortar, with a full coffee program and a sunny, casual outdoor patio. If you get there quick enough, you can usually catch some of the daily savory breakfast sandwiches and breakfast burritos before they sell out, and they’re positively stuffed with plant-based cheese, eggs and meats—as well as seasonal veggies—to get you through the day.

Best for: Bread loaves, pan dulce, cookies

Down in Long Beach, Arturo Enciso’s artisanal panaderia integrates heirloom grains into the art of traditional Mexican pastry-making. Alongside rustic loaves studded with seeds, Gusto Bread serves an array of new-school pan dulce, including conchas, orejas and nixtamal queens—Gusto Bread’s masa-based twist on French kouign-amann. The pan de maiz, made with freshly milled heirloom corn and wildflower honey, will make you rethink your love of American-style cornbread, and we think the guava-marmalade-stuffed pastelitos is the ideal way to start a weekend morning. For a twist on tres leches cake, order the atole cake, which sits on a bed of cream flavored with the traditional Mexican corn drink and comes topped with whipped cream flavored with Andean corn white ganache.

This tiny Japanese bakery along La Brea churns out some of the city’s best Asian-style baked goods, along with a tasty lunch menu of sandwiches, salads and tartines. Alongside freshly baked loaves of milk bread and French baguettes, you can also find curry pan (a hard-to-find savory treat that’s hard to find outside of the South Bay) and a killer, not-too-sweet matcha croissant. Above all, make sure to try the chocolate croissant coated in a crisp almond cookie shell. While Roji Bakery changes its pastry selection on a seasonal basis, you can always count on the potato-stuffed croquettes and individually sized Basque cheesecakes whenever you’re picking up a box of goodies to take home.