San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Bakery also the place for a great torta
Satisfying lunch starts with its house-baked bread
La Panadería bakery was started in San Antonio in 2014 by brothers José and David Cáceres, inspired by their mother’s successful industrial bakery operation in Mexico. The brothers wanted a more personal, customer-based experience, and San Antonio responded by making La Panadería popular enough to grow to three locations: one downtown, one on Broadway just inside Loop 410 and one at La Cantera Heights.
In addition to its popularity with customers, La Panadería has generated critical recognition, including a James Beard Awards semifinalist nod this year for David Cáceres as Outstanding Baker and the bakery’s repeated inclusion in the Express-News Top 100 Dining & Drinks guide.
La Panadería also showed up on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” in 2017, when he called it “a real deal Mexican bakery goin’ old school with their sandwich sourdough and tequila croissants.”
The downtown location has become a line-out-the-door phenomenon, and the La Cantera location is fairly new, so this report comes from the Broadway shop, with its sprawling dining room, a covered patio and the time-honored practice of having the ordering line snake past a pastry case full of croissants, muffins, cinnamon rolls and empanadas.
Best sandwich: La Panadería is all about choices, and the torta (sandwich) menu is a
build-your-own adventure with a dozen options, each available with one of four house-baked breads and a choice of soup or salad. Chicken milanesa ($11.50 with soup
or salad) rose to the top with lightly breaded chicken breast draped with melted Swiss cheese, then dressed with tangy cilantro mayo, smooth guacamole and the sharp counterpoint
of pickled jalapeños.
This sandwich would’ve been good on garden-variety white bread, but the choice of a mahogany-toasted, crunchytopped loaf made with a specialty wheat called Kamut took it to a higher place. And the side salad was anything but an afterthought, a cheeky variation on the Caesar called the César, with queso fresco, sundried tomatoes and the silky spark of avocado-lime dressing. It proved the day’s best sandwich sidekick, outperforming a bowl of thin fideo and an underseasoned black bean soup.
Other sandwiches: As much as I love a punchy al pastor taco from a street cart, I also liked the more refined al pastor La Panadería uses for its torta ($12.99 with soup or salad), cut in bigger pieces, cooked less aggressively and marinated in spices that favored
earth-tone aromatics instead of the more common deep orange tangy growl. Grilled pineapple, queso fresco and grilled onions completed the package.
Telera bread is always the right choice for an al pastor torta, and La Panadería makes one of the best, with a shell that rose like a Neapolitan pizza crust over an interior with more arches and open spaces than a Gothic cathedral.
Telera did the best it could to salvage a carnitas torta ($12.99 with soup or salad), dogged by carnitas with a mushy consistency more like wet tuna salad than the feathered threads of freshly pulled pork.
Breakfast for lunch is one of my favorite ways to do lunch, and La Panadería came through with a creation of fresh and fluffy scrambled eggs, grilled ham, melted cheese and black bean spread on a soft, flaky, buttery croissant ($10.99 with soup or salad).
Because it’s a bakery: How do you talk about La Panadería without mentioning the cinnamon bouquet of chocolatedrizzled monkey bread or a perfectly layered Danish pastry-style croissant with custard and fresh blackberries? Answer: You don’t talk; you eat.