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!
