At Oak Cliff's Maroches Bakery, It's About Live Music and Poetry Just as Much as the Chocoflan

Food is culture, food is art, food is family. There’s no better representation of this than Maroches Bakery in North Oak Cliff.

The bakery started informally more than 18 years ago in the Tellez family home when neighbors started asking about the delicious smells coming from the apartment. The Tellezes began baking for friends, and local businesses and restaurants got wind of their desserts and began ordering them. Before the Tellezes knew it, a new bakery was born.

Maroches Bakery is best known for its tres leches cake, a sponge cake soaked in three milks that is available in vanilla or chocolate, and its conchas, the iconic Mexican pan dulce reminiscent of a shell that’s topped with a sweet, sugary crust. Other items you’ll find there are homemade cheesecakes, chocoflan — a delicious combination of moist chocolate cake baked with a creamy flan resting on top — and Mexican gelatinas. These are gelatins that come in a variety of flavors and combinations, including the almost too beautiful to eat mosaico style.

The tasty treats hurl your taste buds back in time to the most special moments of your life or will quickly become your go-to favorites once you take a bite.

But the bakery is more than just a place to satisfy your sweet tooth. The business has a solid reputation for supporting the local art scene and attracts visitors from all corners of the globe who come to enjoy the baked goods and to soak in the work of North Texas creatives.

Manuel Tellez runs the bakery with his parents, wife and children. He is a lover of the arts and culture of the Americas and regularly opens the bakery’s doors to community artists and groups as a way to cultivate the art scene in Dallas.

Art and food are intertwined at Maroches Bakery. It’s evident from the colorful mural that adorns the exterior of the building and the yearly Dia de los Muertos celebration the shop has hosted for more than a decade. On any given day, you’ll find poets reciting works that speak to how quickly the neighborhood is changing or musicians strumming guitars and playing violins as they sing in a mix of English, Spanish and sometimes indigenous languages.

Maroches is a bakery filled with soul and run by a generous family that happens to sell the most delicious repostería (bite-sized shortbread cookies) and other postres, or deserts, you’ll find in North Texas.

Maroches Bakery, 1227 W. Davis St. (Oak Cliff)