shaomai

Porto’s is officially a bakery, but half of their Glendale location is devoted to regular food as well. I don’t live in the LA area, so whenever I’m in town, I come away with several boxes of Porto’s.

Their sandwiches are ok… they have some cuban sandwiches and some regular sandwiches. The best part is that they come with a couple of strips of their plantain chips. yum! but I come here primarily for 1) the fruit tarts 2) the potato balls.

If Porto’s just served fruit tarts, they could still thrive as a business. Their fruit tarts are SO GOOD. The fruit is always amazingly fresh, sweet, and plentiful no matter what time of year it is. It comes with strawberries, blueberries, peaches, and apples… maybe more. But I believe the only fruit that isn’t fresh are the canned peaches. They make them in several different sizes – at the lunch counter, you can buy the individual sized tarts – about 3-4" diameter, but on the bakery side, you can buy several sizes of much larger ones. I recommend the larger tarts over the individual sized ones because they are slightly different — the larger tarts come with a more graham crackery-crust, and there’s a thin layer of sponge cake underneath the custard. On the individual tarts, they have more of a pastry crust, and just a custard layer, no sponge cake.

The potato balls are great as well. It’s essentially a ball of deep fried mashed potatoes stuffed with ground beef, but I love it.

I would also recommend
- pastelito, a flaky pastry with cream cheese and guava marmelade
- plantain chips as a side order — comes with mojo sauce, a garlicky olive oil
- any of the small bakery goods at the lunch counter… never had something i didn’t like!
- empandas