For my first review/blog post I decided not to review a restaurant but rather a bakery. Because I decided to review a bakery, the regular scoring system I came up with won't work with a bakery so instead I am going with a simple 100 point scale with 90-100 an A, 80-89 a B, 70-79 a C, 60-69 a D, and finally 59 and below is an F. Unlike my high school though, A's will be hard to come by and grade inflation will hopefully be non existent. With this in mind lets get on to the first review.
I have passed by El Buen Pan Bakery several times this past year as I made my way from my apartment to school. Granted this route was a little out of the way but it was the quickest way whenever I needed to stop at the ATM for some cash. After passing by the bakery several times and never going in I decided it was time to take the plunge. This past Saturday I was hungry for some sweets so I ran to the ATM and made my way the El Buen Pan.
I parked on the street in an area that looked liked it used to be a local neighborhood that developed at the turn of the century and became obsolete when the car became a fixture on the streets of Omaha. I walked to the door and Spanish music was playing over a loud speaker as I made my way into the bakery. As I walked in I was pleased to notice the place looked like a bakery as opposed to some new age coffee shop that claims to be a bakery. Dough was mixing in the background and three display cases were full of muffins, cookies, and pastries. The floor was painted a grey blue with the underlying concrete showing in places that have been well traveled, a very good sign.
As the name suggests, Latin baked good are a staple here and while I could recognize some of the goods in the cases such as muffins, cookies and pastries, much of the remaining goods were foreign to me. Overwhelmed by all of the choices I first decided on what looked like an over sized sugar cookie with interesting ridged peaks. My second choice was a cone shaped pastry with what looked like a cream filling. With my selections made the total came to $1.25 and I was going to pay with a $20 bill but the owner wanted that big bill so the price dropped to $1 to satisfy my lone single I had in my wallet.
The sugar cookie was fairly large and had a good texture to it but not as sweet as traditional American style sugar cookies. The result was more of a sweet cracker then what we would traditionally call a cookie, but that just plays on the Latin theme even more. The taste nevertheless was refreshing and didn't give me sugar rush like I was expecting. The other pastry was flaky and just slightly sweet. The cream in the middle also had a smooth sweet vanilla flavor and did not overpower the pastry it is in like many creams have a tendency of doing. The only complaint is that the baked goods were starting to become a little stale, but I am guess that is because it was getting well into the afternoon and fresh baked pastries tend to have a short shelf life because of the amazingness of no fillings or preservatives.
Overall I enjoyed El Buen Pan Bakery and I will be back to sample more delicious goods and have decided to give it a score of 84, well inside of the B range, and a very good score. Above Average
El Buen Pan Bakery
1344 Park Ave
Omaha, NE 68105
Phone: (402) 502-2800
