Amazing Grace

The name might have changed but the restaurant and bakeshop formerly known as Krystal’s still serves pastries worthy of the afterlife. With baking done onsite, the first thing you’ll want to get is the pandesal, which, being named as one of the best in Little Manila, has a tendency to sell out fast. Pandesal isn’t salty as one would guess from its Spanish name, and is to the Philippines what sliced white bread is to the US: ubiquitous, basic, and ranges in quality from the mass-produced to the freshly baked at the local panaderia. Ask for it plain or ube, eat it straight or toasted, dunked in coffee or hot chocolate, filled with meat or left alone. A slight step up would be the pan de coco, which comes stuffed with grated coconut, and on the far end of the richness spectrum sits their Brazo de Mercedes (“Arm of Our Lady of Mercy”). The Brazo is a type of jelly roll where a custard of egg yolks, once a byproduct of church construction that utilized the whites to hold the walls together, is encased in a pillowy meringue (I guess they didn’t use all the egg whites).

photo credit: Eun Hee Kwon