Best Bakery 2014 | Cuban International Bakery | Best of Dallas® 2020 | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Dallas | Dallas Observer
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The word bakery usually evokes pallets of hamburger buns and the occasional baguettes — the sort of white bread baked goods we eat thoughtlessly every day. This is not so at Cuban International Bakery, where sweet smells of caramel and fruit permeate the storefront filled with Cuban coffee sippers. It should be impossible to make pastry this flaky, but there it is, glistening before you until your fork descends and everything explodes into a million butter shards. Those in the mood for savory are in luck, too. There's a Cuban sandwich on the menu that's house-made top to bottom, and it's very, very good.

Deep Ellum's Glazed Donut Works combines the best of both doughnut worlds. They push the limits with sometimes-weird but always-delicious creations like the Donut Grilled Cheese with Bacon and doughnut ice cream sandwiches stuffed with shop-made ice cream — both of which are only available at the shop's weekend late-night window, but they also do traditional staples better than any shop in town. The fritters — be they pineapple rum, peach schnapps or bananas Foster, depending on the day — are reason enough to drag yourself out of bed on Saturday morning. Post show or post-post show, one can't do much better than Glazed.

The cronut arrived in Texas to a yawn. By the time it got here we were all cronutted (it's a word) out, tired of hearing of lines outside bakeries in other cities, and already moving on to other ill-advised baking fusions. This French-Korean bakery's take on the pastry deserves a line of hungry eaters, though, because they just went ahead and stuffed the thing with cream, and then topped it with more cream. It is now completely inedible, but in the best possible way, meaning there is no way you can eat the thing and not distribute parts of it in a half-mile radius around you.

Gonzalez's flour tortillas are not a lot of things. They aren't subtle, they aren't light in any way and they most definitely are not part of any diet you could possibly hope to lose weight on. What they are is amazing. As thick as a pancake, they render accoutrements like butter a mere afterthought. In fact, just so you can keep your focus on the rest of the Oak Cliff and Pleasant Grove institutions' outstanding Tex-Mex, you might be best served saving the tortillas for dessert.

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