Porto's Bakery
The endless highways and blind road rage means that driving in LA rarely leads to serendipitous discoveries, but this week I stumbled upon the famous Porto's Bakery as I was making my way to the 134 from Burbank airport. Christina once waited about and hour in line and brought home some of the most incredible guava pastries this side of Miami. So when the Monkey called out, "Porto's! Porto's!" we stopped for a bite.
This place is just awesome. The picture above captures approximately one-eighth of the entire pastry selection--and that doesn't include the more selective take out wing of the bakery. They specialize in Cuban bakery items, but they have all sorts of eats here. After much drooling and deliberation, we decided on a papas preparada, the Porto's house salad, the tres leches cake and a cortadito. We got a bunch of guava pastries for our friends. The papas preparada is a most tasty sandwich consisting of swiss cheese, lettuce, tomaters, mayo, mustard and...fried potato balls with little bits of beef thrown in! It's kind of like a Japanese croquette sandwich, or more simply put a french fry sandwich. I ate mine while munching on some pickled peppers and it was the best sandwich I'd had in years--well, second to the fish sandwich at Panya, but Panya doesn't have hot peppers. The tres leches cake (see above) almost made my teeth fall out, but the cortadito was a perfect bitter complement. Even the salad was noteworthy with fresh avocados, non-e-coli contaminated spinach, and a mustard lime dressing--all topped with slivers of fried plaintains. I need to have at least 15 more meals and snacks there to try everything I want to taste. The guava cheese pastries made me think of Al-b and are definitely worth the trip a trip to LA.
Other highlights of the trip include a mojito filled evening with friends that included a Bruce Springstein sing-along and lap dance.
On a little visit to Venice beach, we saw this neat little building with art work that reminded me of Jen K over at escapevelocity. Rawk!