Sydney’s only brick-and-mortar Mexican bakery specialises in hard-to-find treats

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Interest in Pancho Bakery has zipped far beyond its North Sydney location. Customers have travelled more than an hour for its pastries (a chef from Brazil among them). Melbourne restaurants have enquired about its bread. People in Adelaide have such deep Pancho Bakery cravings, they’ve requested its baked goods via mail. “Obviously, we send them super fresh and we make sure they arrive the next day,” says co-owner Andrea Aviles.

So what’s inspired the intense following? Well, this is Sydney’s only brick-and-mortar Mexican bakery and it offers a hard-to-find specialty: conchas. Named after the Spanish word for “shell”, this pastry with deeply scored spirals emerged in 18th-century Mexico. Most likely, this brioche-style dough was first kneaded by migrants who arrived with European baking traditions.

Pancho Bakery’s oven trays began filling long before its physical store opened in July. The business was launched in 2020: Aviles started it with Fernando Castillejos, who is also from Mexico City. Like many baking experiments that year, Pancho Bakery was pandemic-inspired.

“We were hoping to bring a little bit of joy and comfort to our people,” Aviles says. For online customers, they made conchas (“the most popular bread in Mexico”, according to Aviles), palmiers (orejas or “ears” in Mexico) and tres leches cake (three-milk cake) – all pastries they still create today.

In 2020, I came across Pancho Bakery’s conchas at Newtown restaurant Maiz. “They were our first customers,” says Aviles. Pancho Bakery still has a presence at Maiz: a cherry blossom concha filled with sakura (cherry blossom) cream was a recent offering, inspired by Japan’s melonpan bread (which has similar shell-like configurations).

Pancho Bakery also sells goods at Latin grocer Mistura in Newtown and The Twelve Cafe in Camperdown, so opening far from the inner west – and over the bridge – made sense. Pancho Bakery sits in Greenwood Plaza, near storefronts for Typo and Kana Sushi.

The pastry counter is vividly lined with concha flavours both traditional (vanilla) and experimental (Oreos). I’ve crunched through coconut, Tim Tam and dulce de leche versions, but my favourites have been the pistachio-green pastry and the chocolate concha pressed into waffle form, served with apricot jam and sliced strawberries.

Optimising conchas with coffee or hot chocolate is a Mexican pastime. At Pancho Bakery, pastries are especially good with the espresso: shots of Schibello’s Colossus blend infused with the cinnamon-spiced rice milk known as horchata. The instant sugar rush it shares with the milky sweetness of Vietnamese coffee is exactly why I love it: it charges my brain with wonderfully uncomplicated joy.

I’ve never seen coffee-spiked horchata in Sydney before. Ditto champurrado, an ancient hot chocolate that predates European-style cocoa by thousands of years. At Pancho Bakery, it’s thickened with corn – a foundational Mexican ingredient.

“We melt it in the chocolate because it’s how Aztecs used to have it,” says Castillejos. The cinnamon-sweetened sips are highly sustaining. Consider this the original energy drink (but way more pleasant than chugging Red Bull).

While Pancho Bakery offers some familiar items (empanadas with excellent salsa macha), I savour the new-to-me experiences most. Like coyotas, introduced here by co-owner Marcela Ramirez (this disc-shaped pastry is beloved in Mexico’s north, where she’s from).

I order the candied guava version which evokes a jam tart or eating the best bit of an Iced VoVo. Pancho Bakery was also the first place I encountered molletes: here, they’re made in-house with teleras bread, layered with twice-cooked pinto beans and nicely smoked cheese.

Currently, Pancho Bakery is celebrating Day of the Dead with an ofrenda (altar) featuring traditional pastries (pan de muerto) shaped like bones and flavoured with corn husk ash, cacao and other significant ingredients.

Despite the altar’s marigolds and bright decorations, the busy Greenwood Plaza setting means it’s easy to overlook Pancho Bakery – and this one-of-a-kind shop deserves to be noticed. I feel hopeful when a customer buys a pastry and delivers their verdict: “It’s good!” they say, loudly, enthusiastically and accurately.

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