Miami: Yisell Bakery (July 2016)



My spouse and I stopped in at Yisell Bakery on a Saturday morning in early July 2016. Yisell is a Cuban bakery that is located in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami, on SW 8th Street (or “Calle Ocho”, which means “Eighth Street” in Spanish) at SW 13th Avenue.

The bakery sells countless varieties of pastries, breads, and cakes, as well as coffee, tamales, sandwiches, and fries. Their famous guayaba con queso pastelito is a crispy and flaky pastry filled with guava paste and sweetened pastry cheese that is shaped into a rectangle in order to distinguish them from circular beef pastelitos and pentagonal cheese pastelitos. Similar to a strawberry, guava is a tart, red fruit. Masareales are another famous Cuban dessert that feature guava sandwiched between two layers of pound cake. As with most businesses in Little Havana, Yisell is primarily Spanish-speaking. When we tried to pay for our purchase and the attendant told us the price of “sixty-seven” in accented English, we asked her to repeat it, thinking that perhaps something was lost in the Spanish-to-English translation, but no! The pastry was actually sixty-seven cents! It has been a long time since we paid so little for something so good! The bakery has a U-shaped counter, some of which is positioned along the front and side windows where you can sit to enjoy your food and the view on Calle Ocho.

Yisell Bakery is worth a stop on your food tour of Little Havana!





No comments: