The empty bakery cases at Alameda Marketplace (1650 Park Street) will soon be filled with colorful milk buns flavored with ube, matcha, passion fruit, and pandan, as well as flaky croissants wrapped around spam and savory danishes topped with Japanese furikake seasoning, Kewpie mayonnaise and bonito fish flakes.
Bake Sum, the celebrated and critically acclaimed bakery in Oakland, is opening its second location this week in Alameda and will be serving up a mouth-watering selection of treats including their iconic Croissubi—a Spam musubi in croissant form—which was named one of “The 26 Best Dishes We Ate Across the U.S. in 2024” by the New York Times.
Owner and baker Joyce Tang started the bakery in 2020 as a pop-up and opened the Lake Merritt storefront in 2021, quickly garnering rave reviews for her pastries which she describes as having an “Asian Americana” influence.
“We love to tell stories with our pastries and we also love to bring a lot of new flavors,” Tang told the Alameda Post. “So everything that we make has to be beautiful, delicious, and intentional.” Bake Sum pastries, she explained, “really represent our childhoods across the Bay Area, in ways that haven’t really been represented before.”
Bake Sum’s Okonomiyaki Danish, for example, is based on the savory okonomiyaki pancake, a dish that has roots in World War ll when, according to Tang, there was a rice shortage in Japan and people used flour that had been introduced to them by Americans. “They took leftovers from the fridge and the flour and made okonomiyaki pancakes, which stood for, ‘as you like it.’” The dish is traditionally topped with Kewpie mayonnaise and bonito flakes, and Tang was inspired to recreate the pancake in danish form. “It’s still a crowd favorite,” she says…