In the pantheon of comfort foods, what’s more evocative than the scent of baking bread? A taste of nostalgia, a memory in food form… there’s just something about biting into a delicious piece of bread. Happily, Tampa Bay has more than its fair share of beloved bakeries, proffering not only artisan loaves but also exquisite cakes, pastries and doughnuts.
La Segunda
Best known for legendary loaves of Cuban bread (some 22,000 are baked each day), La Segunda is famous for using palmetto leaves to score its perfectly crunchy loaves. But the Ybor City-born bakery offers much more than most people know.
“People get confused and think we’re a Cuban bakery,” says La Segunda’s fourth-generation owner, Copeland More. “All the stuff we make here was really formed in Ybor City from the melting pot of communities—Italians, Cubans, German, Spanish—that arrived in the early 20th century. Our food represents those cultures.”
Devotees descend for guava and cheese turnovers, Italian cookies, German chocolate cake and more. The bakery’s tradition dates to 1915, when More’s great-grandfather, Juan, left Spain to fight in the Spanish-American War in Cuba before finding his way to Tampa.
“We feel a lot of pride,” says More. “People come in and love to tell their stories of when they were young and their grandmother used to take them to this bakery.”
JB3 DoughJoe
“The smell of bread will raise your serotonin levels,” says Jaime Laukuf. Together with her baker husband, Jason, she keeps sourdough fans smiling and lining up outside their Ybor City retail outlet, JB3Dough Joe.
“When people walk in our door, they have this scowl, whether from the sunshine or something else. Then they smell the bread, and I call it an automatic facelift,” Laukuf says. The long fermentation process gives the signature sourdough its tasty air pockets, and steam-injected ovens ensure the loaves freeze well, too (dedicated fans come from far and wide to fill their freezers, says Laukuf).
“Our sourdough is old-world style, made from whole organic grains we mill ourselves at an organic farm in North Carolina,” Laukuf explains.
Regulars also relish the OG croissants with French Isigny butter, German seedy bread, seasonal Bavarian pretzels, bagels, Italian ciabatta and more.
Mazarro’s Italian Market
If one local purveyor of all things Italian needs no introduction, it’s Mazarro’s—St. Pete’s veritable temple of Italian breads, pastries, charcuterie, cheeses, gelato, specialty meats and so much more. “The key to our bread is the amazing ovens that we imported from Italy; they’re very much a key to the quality of the product,” says manager Robert Smith.
Italian loaves and Tuscan bread fly out the door alongside focaccia, olive loaves, semolina loaves, French baguettes, panini rolls and more. The cranberry nut bread is sold only on Saturdays, and pastry standouts include the legendary cannolis, cheesecakes and rum cakes.
Gulf Coast Sourdough
This sandwich house, beloved for its sourdough, traces its roots to the Ybor City Saturday Market, where Gulf Coast Sourdough husband-and-wife owners, Christina Cann and Brett Wiewiora, first started selling their artisan breads.
Today, they’ve squared their focus on their sandwicherie, where sandwiches served on sourdoughs with flavors like roasted red pepper, turmeric and black pepper, asiago cheese and crowd favorite Simply Sourdough have amassed a loyal following.
Wiewiora says he’s proud of his shop’s approachability. “We’ve always occupied a kind of middle ground,” he says. “Most bakeries are either super fancy or else corner places mostly reheating things; there’s not a lot of middle ground.”
“We’ve always found our main focus is doing the breads the right way with sourdough. All long-fermented, it’s the best kind of bread for you. It also just tastes better,” he says.
Wright’s Gourmet House
While most of Tampa is still asleep, the bakers at Wright’s are already busy spinning cakes on turntables and festooning them with frosting. The South Tampa bakery and café is known for its classic yellow Alpine cake, rum cake, strawberry cake and so much more.
“We have so many regular customers who come in for cakes for things like baby showers, first birthdays, you name it,” says Tracy Morley, who’s been the shop’s bakery supervisor for a decade. Chances are, if you’ve celebrated a special life milestone in Tampa, something sweet from here has found its way to your table. After all, Wright’s has been a household name in Tampa since 1963.
SuperNatural Food & Wine
The bright yellow awning at this downtown doughnut bastion with a streetside takeout window may elicit a Pavlovian response from those who line up regularly. They come to snag one (or more) of the 200 cinnamon and sugar doughnuts made daily here and dusted with single-origin spices. SuperNatural Food & Wine usually sells out of the sweets before lunch, says owner Wesley Roderick. His doughnuts’ specialty dough has burger bun origins from a restaurant Roderick formerly owned.
“There was a day where I got a wild hair and essentially took some of the dough we had for the buns and turned it into a doughnut’s shape and fried it to give it a shot,” he says. “The result is not comparable to anything else from a taste standpoint.” We couldn’t agree more.
Pane Rustica
Many people can bake, and many can cook. But husband-and-wife team Kevin and Karyn Kruszewski have mastered the art of having a full-scale artisan bakery thrive alongside a chef-driven kitchen in Pane Rustica, a beloved South Tampa haunt that first opened shop in 1999.
Hundreds of perfectly chocolatey and chewy espresso cookies fly out the door daily. And when it comes to bread, scratch-made sourdough and rustic Italian loaves top the list of house favorites baked daily by a crew that’s up and at it by 5 a.m.
“We have a very loyal and committed staff here, and we’re very proud of what they do,” Karyn said.
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