Porto’s Bakery is a Glendale institution that operates at a volume and quality level that’s hard to explain until you’ve seen it. We made the drive from Brentwood on a Saturday morning for the first time two years ago, on the recommendation of a colleague who grew up near the original location. The line was forty minutes. The medianoche was worth it. Here’s the practical guide to visiting.
The Rosa Porto Story
The story starts in Manzanillo, Cuba, where Rosa Porto discovered her love of baking. After the Cuban Revolution, her husband Raul Sr. was sent to a labor camp, and Rosa began baking cakes in secret to support their three children — the years that shaped everything the bakery would become. The family emigrated to Los Angeles in 1971 with nothing but their recipes, and Rosa started selling cakes from home. By 1976, the family opened its first bakery, a small storefront in Silver Lake. The move to Glendale in 1982 was the real turning point, and the bakery has earned raves from local press ever since, including a glowing Los Angeles Times review. In 2016, Yelp officially named the family’s Burbank location the #1 business in the country.
What to Order
The Papa Rellena (potato ball) is the cornerstone of the menu: crispy, panko-style breading around creamy mashed potato, wrapped around seasoned ground beef (picadillo) with peppers, onions, and olives. There’s a spicy version with the same filling and a kick added. The croquetas — chicken and bechamel, breaded and fried — are the Spanish side of the menu. On the sweet side, the Guava and Cheese Strudel is the bakery’s top seller for a reason: impossibly light puff pastry, guava jam cutting through the cream cheese. It belongs to a category the bakery calls “Refugiados,” named for what the pastry represents to the family. The Besito cookies (dulce de leche-filled shortbread) and the plain cheese rolls are both worth grabbing too.
On the cafe side, don’t skip the sandwiches. The Cubano is done the traditional way — slow-roasted pork, ham, Swiss, pickles, and mustard on house-made Cuban bread, pressed until the crust shatters. The Pan con Lechon is the purist’s order: roasted pork with garlic and mojo, grilled onions, on a toasted roll.
How to Actually Visit
Here’s how to actually make the most of a visit, without wasting half your day in line.
- Use the online-order pickup line. There are three separate lines at the Glendale location — the main bakery/cafe line, a pickup line for online orders, and a separate line just for whole cakes and custom orders. Ordering ahead and grabbing the pickup line is by far the smartest way to go.
- Time it for a weekday afternoon. For the shortest wait, aim for 2:00 to 4:00 PM on a weekday, the lull between the lunch rush and the after-work crowd.
- Avoid Sunday mornings entirely. Right after church lets out is the busiest window of the week by far — expect the full forty-minute line and then some.
- Order the medianoche. It’s easy to overlook the Cubano’s sweeter cousin, pressed on soft egg bread instead of Cuban bread, but it’s the sandwich we drove all the way from Brentwood for that first time.
- Don’t just grab pastries at the counter. The cafe menu is easy to miss if you’re focused on the bakery case, but the Cubano and Pan con Lechon are worth the extra few minutes in line.
- Not in Southern California? Order online. Porto’s ships frozen pastries nationwide through Porto’s Bake at Home, so you don’t have to book a flight for a Guava and Cheese Strudel.
- Watch for the Anaheim location. A new Porto’s is planned for the Downtown Disney District, though the company hasn’t announced an official opening date yet.
