Alliance Bakery
Formerly a Polish bakery, Alliance was sold to a French pastry a few years back and is now turning out wonderful-looking (and affordable) French pastries in addition to offerings like quiche and, in a nod to the neighborhood, kolacky. Strong Intelligentsia coffee and espresso drinks are available, in addition to Naked juices, hibiscus lemonade, and a few upscale sodas. The well-maintained 1930s interior is warm and charming, and the coffeehouse space next door has free WiFi. —Claire Dolinar
At Angel Food Bakery the window’s filled with elaborate cakes—there might be a pink single-layer number with bright orange flowers, a four-tiered white meringue wedding cake, and a winter-themed creation decorated with white snowballs and snowflakes made from fondant—but I love owner Stephanie Samuels’s takeoffs on Hostess favorites: the Twinkie-like Airstream, an imitation Sno Ball called the Igloo, and a chocolate-covered whoopie pie that tastes like a Ding Dong. (She makes a homemade version of a Fig Newton too.) Angel Food’s less whimsical fare includes tart lemon squares, dense carrot layer cake, and rich fudge brownies. Each day there’s a special Commuter Sandwich for breakfast; on one morning it was a scrumptious combination of prosciutto, Brie, and fig jam on a slender ficelle (a tiny baguette). —Laura Levy Shatkin
The ryes at Chicago Polish bakeries where owner Michael Mikusch used to work are “compromised,” he claims, with “wheat and some coloring.” His signature bread uses “100 percent rye flour, genuine sourdough, and little yeast” to yield a dense, naturally moist loaf, with a “shelf life of five days.” This small but busy Lincoln Park shop showcases European recipes and baking techniques and deli imports from Wisconsin, Canada, and Europe. The sunflower-seed bread’s flavor is “from the ground,” Mikusch says, and the key to the dough of his apple strudel—the traditional sweet he’s most proud of—is to make it with olive oil and “stretch it paper thin.” Other desserts include Sachertorte, bienenstich, and delightfully light Pertikus and Linzer butter cookies, which I couldn’t stop eating. If you don’t want to grocery shop for rarities like Bavarian Weisshurst, Debreziner, and Westphalian ham, you can sit down for frittaten or goulash soups (the best goulash I’ve ever had—sorry, grandma) or create your own sandwich. There are also several salads and an array of birthday and wedding cakes sans artificial flavors. —Ryan Hubbard
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The delectable sweets of Judy Contino, former Ambria pastry chef and Lettuce Entertain You corporate pastry chef, are the attraction at this Lakeview bakery. Each day there’s a light lunch menu—a soup, a couple sandwiches, salads, and quiche. Dessert might be a rich butter-crusted apple bistro tart, but the absolute winner when it comes to pastry is the brioche, its buttery egg dough by far the best in town. Ice cream, made in-house year-round, is also outstanding: “In my gastrocosmology,” writes Reader critic Nicholas Day of the chocolate, “this is the ice cream that immediately precedes the rapture.” —Laura Levy Shatkin
Georgian immigrant Arkady Kats and his wife, Rita, opened Bread ‘n’ Bowl Company in a Niles strip mall in July 2008, offering 16 soups—all natural, never frozen—at ridiculously low prices. While they’re tasty and include some unusual varieties (beef tomato and apricot, spinach lemon and turkey meatballs), they’re enhanced immeasurably by a piece of the Georgian flatbread—the round puri or the cocoon-shaped shoti—baked daily behind the counter in a massive barrel-like brick oven called a toné. A cousin of the Punjabi tandoor, the toné is the essential appliance in traditional Georgian cuisine, which draws on both European and Asian influences and is popular all over the former Soviet Union. Kats also offers a few eastern European cakes, and handmade dumplings (pierogi and pelmeni) and puff pastries (pirozhki). Specific Georgian varieties include the cheese-filled puff pastries known as khachapuri. Traditionally these are filled with a cheese called suluguni, but in this case it’s a frozen, ground mixture of mozzarella and several fetas.The toné can handle about 40 puris at a time. When it’s reached capacity, the first are puffed and blistered. Baker George Gelashvili grips a long pole in each arm—one with a hook on the end, and the other with a spatula—and plucks the loaves from the oven. He can do hundreds each day, and does so when the bakery has orders from a half dozen or so supermarkets and restaurants. But nothing beats the hot, chewy, stretchy bread pulled straight from the oven. —Mike Sula
