Sweets for the heat

Vanarin Kuch opened Koffeteria in November 2019 in a bright EaDo storefront, and it quickly became the bakery other bakers talk about. His pastry case reads like a map of Houston: a kolache stuffed with brisket and seasoned like a bowl of pho, Cambodian elote cornbread, a pistachio baklava croissant, and breakfast tacos with egg and Chinese sausage that former Chronicle critic Alison Cook called hall of fame material. Sweet or savory, the technique is precise, with shatter on the croissants. Wash it down with a Salty Cambodian, the house coffee finished with butter and salt. The James Beard Foundation named it an Outstanding Bakery semifinalist in 2024 and again in 2025, and The New York Times put it on its 2024 list of America's best bakeries.

Rebecca Masson went to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris at 28, interned at Le Bristol, then worked pastry at Daniel and db bistro moderne in New York before coming to Houston in 2007. She started Fluff in 2011 as a wholesale operation, competed on Bravo's Top Chef: Just Desserts that same year, opened a Midtown shop in 2015, and moved to this sunny Heights storefront in March 2020. Houstonians know her as the Sugar Fairy. The case is full of big-hearted sweets: the Veruca Salt cake of devil's food, salted caramel buttercream and pretzel crunch; the Couch Potato cookie loaded with chips, pretzels, cornflakes and marshmallows; the cult-favorite Unicorn Bait. Her mother, Dodie Wilson, runs the wine shop next door.

Sigmund, Sol and Max Jucker survived the Nazi camps, and on May 8, 1949, four years to the day after liberation, they opened Three Brothers Bakery on Holman Street. They brought the family's Polish recipes and, by the family's account, were the first to bring the bagel to Houston. The shop landed on South Braeswood in 1960 and has since come back from Allison, Ike and Harvey. Sigmund's son Bobby Jucker and his wife Janice now lead it. The long counter holds challah, rye and onion boards next to cupcakes and custom cakes. Buy the pecan pie Country Living called the best by mail, the gingerbread, a coffee cake, and, around Thanksgiving, the Pumpecapple Piecake: three pies baked inside a cake.

Otto Sanchez did pastry at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, came home to run the pastry program at La Table in 2014, and opened Magnol in 2019. It calls itself Houston's organic breadmaker, and its croissants and baguettes supply a good share of the city's best dining rooms, among them Le Jardinier, Rosie Cannonball and Coltivare. The retail shop is a small counter in a Spring Branch center off North Post Oak, and the pastry case is fullest in the morning. Start with a plain butter croissant to see the lamination, then add the almond croissant and pain au chocolat, a seasonal fruit tart, and a baguette to take home.

Lawrence Shipley started frying doughnuts in Houston in 1936, selling hand-cut rings wholesale from a bakery on Crockett Street for a nickel a dozen before opening retail shops in the 1940s. The company grew into a chain of hundreds of stores across the South, but it is still headquartered on North Main, and this store up the road is the one Houstonians point to. It is a plain, no-fuss counter that never closes, and at busy hours the trays turn over fast enough that the glazed are often still warm. Get a dozen glazed first, since that light, yeasty ring is the whole point. Then add a chocolate iced, an apple fritter, and a sausage kolache for the road.

Brothers Gus and Raymond Moeller, from a German family in the Texas Hill Country, opened their bakery on Almeda Road in 1930. It has been on Bellaire Boulevard since 1990, and Gus's grandson Eric Moeller keeps it running with the 1930s recipes and a pre-World War II oven. This is a neighborhood bakery in the truest sense, a modest shop with painted holiday art in the windows and a staff that has stayed for decades. The case is gloriously old-fashioned: tiny iced petit fours that sell by the dozen, a moist white cake baked from scratch every day, strawberry cake, Italian cream cake, lemon chiffon, orange rolls and cheese straws, plus gingerbread men and king cakes in season.

Cloud 10 began in 2011 with a banana split. Pastry chef Chris Leung's plated version impressed Christopher Balat enough that the two founded a creamery around his ice creams, and the brand has since grown from scoop shops to grocery freezers. Leung builds flavors the way he would build a plated dessert, with no extracts or artificial flavors, and the lineup leans on Houston's Asian pantry as much as the classics. Look for Cafe Sua Da, which tastes like a Vietnamese iced coffee, toasted rice, and banana cinnamon, plus in-store specials such as pandan and mango, a layered ice cream series, and tiramisu. The Heights shop sits at the south end of the boulevard, an easy stop after an evening walk along the esplanade.

Erwin Ahrens opened the Kolache Shoppe on Richmond Avenue in 1970, working out his dough by asking every Czech grandmother he knew how she made hers. The answer was patience: scratch dough, fresh fillings, and time to rise. In 2014, after 44 years, he passed the business to Randy and Lucy Hines, a regular he had spent years teaching, and the recipes carried over intact. The Greenway shop on Richmond is a quick, early-morning stop. The sweet kolaches are the heart of it: apricot, poppy seed, cream cheese and peach. The savory klobasniky are just as good, especially the Prasek's venison sausage with cheese and the Pinkerton's brisket with egg and cheddar.

Sara Brook, a fifth-generation Houstonian who walked away from a law track to bake, opened Dessert Gallery in 1995 behind the old Cafe Express on Kirby. In 2009 she moved it to the corner of Kirby and Richmond, into a colorful cafe with long cases of layer cakes and room to sit with two forks and one slice. It turned 30 in 2025, and the classics are why: a tall carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, a milky tres leches, chocolate chunk cookies hand-dipped in chocolate, and the Cosmic Birthday Cake of chocolate meringue, mousses and brownie, offered a couple of times a year. Cupcakes, truffles and brownie balls round out the case, and the whole thing now ships nationwide.

Booza is the Arabic word for ice cream, and here it means the elastic eastern Mediterranean style made with mastic, a tree resin that gives it a chewy pull somewhere between ice cream and taffy. The recipe traces back to Sarah Rukab, who supported her family by selling small batches of ice cream in Palestine in the 1930s; her descendant Fadi brought it to Houston in 2018. The little Richmond Avenue shop near the Galleria is bright and casual, with more than 20 flavors made in small batches. Start with ashta, a clotted-cream flavor, crusted in pistachios. Then pair orange blossom or rosewater with lemon mint or Turkish coffee. The texture surprises first-timers, then wins them over.