You know you’re at a good party when you see the iconic yellow bags from Porto’s Bakery show up. L.A.’s favorite Cuban bakery has been in L.A. for more than 50 years, offering up potato balls and guava cheese pastries at affordable prices in increasingly swankier surroundings. Two new locations in Anaheim and Ontario will join the existing half dozen spread out from Northridge to Buena Park. The company serves a reported 23 million customers every year who come in to cater weddings, quinceañeras, birthdays, baby showers and funerals.
Rosa Porto was a baker in her native Manzanillo, who fled in 1971, following the Cuban Revolution. “Whenever the secret police would come to raid the house, we already knew they were coming,” her daughter Betty told KCET in 2017. “The neighbors would take the equipment we had to the backyard, so they never caught her.”
Rosa and Raul Porto moved to Los Angeles and opened a bakery in their Silver Lake home in 1971 and stayed involved in the family business until her death in 2019. “Rosa was an incredible woman who started Porto’s humbly from her home kitchen selling cakes and pastries to friends and family,” her family posted to Instagram at the time. “While simultaneously being an extraordinary wife and mother to her three children.”
In 1982, the operation expanded to a 30,000 square foot facility in Glendale, which became the company’s flagship store. The legendary lines started appearing in Burbank when the store in Magnolia Park opened in 2005. Increasingly larger locations subsequently appeared in Downey, Buena Park, West Covina and Northridge.
The two new stores are equally enormous. The Anaheim location at Downtown Disney is being built on the site of the former La Brea Bakery and Earl of Sandwich, along with two ticket booths in the esplanade. An opening date has not yet been announced, although construction is well underway. The Ontario store will be just north of the 10 freeway at Archibald Avenue in a new 8.6-acre development not far from Ontario airport.
“For years, we’ve welcomed guests from across the Inland Empire who have traveled to visit our bakeries, and we’re excited to finally have a home here,” Raul Porto, CEO of Porto’s Bakery & Café, said in a statement. “We’re grateful for Ontario’s warm welcome. Our family has always valued the connections we build with the people and communities we serve, and we can’t wait to welcome guests to this new and special place.”
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