Conchas Are Just the Beginning

Ánimo’s pan dulce. Photo: Cayla Zahoran

When Roberto Levinson was planning Ánimo, his new café in Turtle Bay, he wanted to offer the full Mexican-breakfast experience. There are chilaquiles — crisp and coated in guajillo salsa — sure, but the first thing anyone sees when they walk into the shop is a display case of pan dulce, conchas, and others fragrant with corn or coated in nonpareil sprinkles. One recent morning, customers were sampling ratoncito de queso, a sort of cheese danish. The breads are baked fresh every morning by a team of bakers led by chef Jonathan Barragan, who grew up in Queens going to panaderías. A delayed opening turned out to be something of a boon because it gave them time to perfect these recipes. “We went to different bakeries around New York, the ones that are reviewed really high, and looked at comparisons of how we can execute it the same or even higher,” he says.

One of the more tired conversations about eating in New York is that the Mexican food here isn’t very good. But the notion is also outdated: Recent years have brought advancements in tortillas and carnitas, and many new spots — Taqueria Ramirez, Sobre Masa, Quique Crudo, Mariscos el Submarino, Chalupas Poblanas el Tlecuile, Cocina Consuelo — have expanded the city’s scope and understanding of Mexican cooking. Most recently, a growing number of businesses have put a focus on pan dulce, Mexico’s canon of sweet breads. Restaurants and bakeries, like Ánimo and Atla’s Conchas, as well as pop-ups including Panadería 2D and Don Perea, are providing relief from the hype bakeries pushing croissant contortions and pastries designed more to be photographed than to be eaten.

It helps that the universe of pan dulce is vast. Everyone knows the concha, the briochelike sweet roll with a crunchy topping made from butter and flour. But there are also orejas, a puff pastry like French palmiers; rebanadas de mantequilla, sweet bread topped with buttercream; concha-adjacent rolls including the sesame-heavy pecosa and the chocolate-dipped calvo; borrachito; cono de nieve; pan de muerto … the list goes on. Of course, many pan dulce can be found in the pockets of New York where panaderías have been open for decades. Sunset Park’s Don Paco López, for instance, started baking back in 1991. On Roosevelt Avenue, pan dulce spill out at the door at places like Todo Rico. “For me, it’s all about Charro,” says Andrés Tonatiuh Galindo Maria, who owns Nenes Taqueria and grew up going to the Bushwick bakery. (Just make sure to go at 8 a.m. or 5 p.m., he advises, when the bread is fresh.)

The classic spots tend to stick to tradition, but newer arrivals are willing to expand the boundaries. Masa Madre, which opened in Sunnyside this October, isn’t strictly a Mexican panadería. There are croissants, Colombian pandebono, old-fashioned doughnuts and baguettes alongside pan dulce like mantecadas (a sort of muffin) and the sandwich breads bolillos and teleras. It is, however, chef Jose Luis Flores’s concha that most stood out to me and made me understand why they’re so ubiquitous, airy, and moist, made with Cacao Barry Extra Brute or actual vanilla, with a roll that’s sourdough, like everything else at the bakery.

The secret — and stick with me if you’ve heard this before — is to focus on ingredients and traditional techniques. “It’s basics that people lose along the way, because they want to make money,” he says, listing off the ways people might cut corners like swapping milk for water or shortening for butter. “My guys would ask me, ‘Why is the vanilla concha a little brown on top and not as white as the other bakeries?’ And I was like, ‘Listen, man, if I wanted white, I’d just go and grab vegetable shortening, mix it up with sugar and flour, and it’s gonna be like snow white.’ I don’t want that. I want the flavor.”

Conchas are a specialty of the pop-up Panadería 2D, too, and Atla’s Conchas in East Harlem, a micro-bakery where grains are milled in-house and all of the conchas are made with a combination of Appalachian white wheat and white Sonora wheat flours. The married couple Mauricio Lopez Martinez and Caroline Anders (who met while baking at Weaver Street Bakery in North Carolina) offer their conchas in rotating flavors like raspberry, pumpkin, and coffee: “It’s familiar to a lot of folks; it’s a recipe we can do really well with the grains that we have. It just kind of felt like the perfect solution.” The focus on using the entire grain (a step beyond, they say, whole grain) means their pastries have more heft and depth than some others. (The sleeper hit may be their Mexican wedding cookie, with little bits of walnut, a tender texture, and enough citrus to make you feel like you just peeled an orange.)

The idea that conchas might be an entry point for other ideas and pastries informs the approach at Ánimo, too, where customers can find nidos, the soft pound cake surrounded by a flakier ring coated in sugar; Garibaldis, little upside-down cakes with apricot jam and a decorative layer of nonpareil sprinkles; and kekitos corn cakes that taste like they came straight from the field. Then there’s that ratoncito de queso, which one of the restaurant’s bakers, who learned to make it in Mexico, introduced to the menu. It might look like an egg tart to the untrained eye, but it’s richer and unexpectedly creamy thanks to the condensed milk, half-and-half, and cream cheese. “The concha is the staple pan dulce, but we have puerquito, orejas, pan de huevo,” says Barragan, the café’s chef. “There are so many different versions of pan dulce, depending on the region and style of cooking. We just want to introduce and showcase these more uncommon pastries.”