Isabella Bakery

This is a small, unassuming place with good baked good options. They have savory stuff like chicken and beef empanadas as well as cookies and breads. You can get a sandwich and chips for under $ 5! The staff is friendly and there is plenty of street parking on Foster and the side streets.

Two other lovely things: 1) The weekend breakfast: Sweet plantains, eggs your way (I generally get sunny side up), mashed frijoles, light tomato salsa, cheese + bread + coffee. 2) Whatever tamale special they got going on.

Great little Guatemalan bakery. The customer service is good. The staff is friendly and the food is very inexpensive. The pastries in there are really great and delicious. I really love their sweet bread. I would definitely say go and check it out.

I used to frequent this bakery when I worked in Ravenswood. It had great baked goods especially the empanadas. I also would get to choose from some yummy lunch choices (limited amount and not always available): croissant ham sandwich, rotisserie chicken plate, or tamales. I would go back each time to try each choice and return to get the same thing over. It was cash only unless $ 10 minimum to use credit card I think. But the cc machine did not always work. There was an ATM there too just in case. Abundant street parking on Foster was free at the time too, not sure about now. It is a great family owned shop with great service as well.

This is a sweet and savory Guatemalan bakery — a hidden gem with a passionate owner. This is not like a Mexican bakery with dry, unsatisfying sweet breads. The ingredients are higher quality, my favorite is a rice flour cake they call a «quesadilla» not to be mistaken for the Mexican tortilla stuffed with melted cheese. It’s gluten free, hearty and just sweet enough to not need anything.
This place is a treasure, ask questions, try new things, the menu is not always well documented. Enjoy!

Shorten review since my browser crashed and deleted my longer post. In short, very inexpensive, great service, delicious treats. Too cheap to pass up.

The staff was friendly and the food surprisingly cheap. I enjoyed trying out the Guatemalan pastries. They could use some more descriptions of their offerings on a menu or chalk board, and outdoor seating would really help (although the latter may require costly city permits). It’s a nice place to stop for a portable snack during a walk in the neighborhood.

This place was fantastically fun to go into! Not just for the yummy’s but the wonderful corky staff! The fruit empanadas were good. We were asking the man working what the other cookies tasted like and he said they all pretty much tasted the same. Gotta love his honesty. Needless to say, we bought a huge box of stuff and it set us back a whopping $ 9. Great deal. Did not eat it all. But it was fun and different. I think it is Guatemalan.

I was drawn to this Bakery for the first time, by the enticing signs on the window. But when I went in, I had to wait for some time before anyone appeared from the back. There was little to be said about the description of the food, written or verbally. So I winged it, and ordered by looks. Unfortunately a few hours later my gut also disagreed with the food.
Sorry for the bad review, but I was disappointed on a few levels.

Woke up this morning waaaaay too early due to the child, and realized he was Not Going Back To Sleep. So I left daddy to snuggle him and searched Unilocal for a bakery, hoping for morning pastries. It appears that many bakeries in this area think that late morning is an acceptable time for a bakery to open. This is false. I want a pastry when it is too early for anything else. If you are trying to sell me pastry at brunch time, you have already lost.
Unilocal listed no hours for this place, but seeing as it’s about a block from my new apartment, I decided to just walk over and hope. I showed up in front of the doors at 6:40am, and though the doors list hours as 7am-​8pm, Isabella ushered me in anyway. The empanadas looked good but inscrutable (from the outside, strawberry, apple, and pineapple all look the same), so I did what any good scientist would do: got two of each, plus two coffees. Isabella took pains to explain the rest of the menu to me — I’ll be back to try a ham sandwich later in the day, and maybe a tamale. She also tucked a small bag of cookies in my order to try for free.
Six empanadas and two coffees (plus the freebie cookies) set me back a whopping eleven bucks and change. The coffee was tasty — strong without being bitter. It’s no Metropolis, but it’s both better and closer than Starbucks. I ate a strawberry empanada first and the husband had an apple one; he said the outside of his was a little dry, and I wished mine had a bit more filling, but they were also tasty.
Overall, good food with a star upgrade for the warm, overwhelmingly friendly service.

I just tried their meat empanadas…
They are just okay… I’ve had better… but the customer service is excellent.

Majar empanadas = yummmmmmmmmy dulce de leche. The pineapple empanadas are also great. They are quite cheap, and taste almost like the almond cookies you sometimes get at Chinese restaurant, but filled with wonderfulness. Service was friendly and helpful.
There is a $ 10 minimum to use a credit card, though.

This is a nice bakery to have near by. Isabella is a very nice person and so is everyone that I’ve dealt with there. My favorite thing to get is the tamales. They are not 100% like Mexican ones. These have a solid piece of pork meat and are wrapped in banana leaves as opposed to corn husks.
They also make a great pound cake that they call ‘quesadilla’ which has nothing to do with a Mexican or especially a Spanish quesadilla. They have another kind of pound cake as well, the name of which escapes me. Both are dirt cheap.
As for the rest of the pasteries, I have to say that they are not too appealing for me b/​c most all Mexican and Central American pasteries use margarine and not butter. That makes them cheap but it also leaves a thick film of grease in your mouth where as butter melts at body tempurature and of course tastes much better.
But if you dont care about that and are looking for some cheap (and I do mean cheap) pasteries, go for it.

I go here nearly every morning for a croissant with my friends from work. They always know what I’m there for and practically have it waiting for me. I can’t recall ever having such a tasty croissant, and it’s soooo cheap as well.
I’d give it 5 stars but they’re essentially cash only (credit requires at least a $ 10 purchase which here requires about 6 or 7 items just about), and sometimes you get unlucky and get what can only be described as yesterday’s baked goods. If they were just a bit more consistent I’d go for 5 stars.

Okay, so this place doesn’t look like anything special when you drive by, but they were friendly enough, and the empanada’s were delicious. For people like me, with no self control, go ahead and try the strawberry, the pineapple, and the apple empanadas. I brought a bunch of them to work to show all my suburbanite yuppie coworkers a little culture.

The bright yellow awning over the entrance caught my eye on my way home today so I parked and pit stopped in. The first thing I saw when I walked into the little corner spot was the hot glass case of some good looking boxed rotisserie chicken with corn on the cob and a huge hot pepper on top and grabbed one. Looking at the baked goods, I wasn’t too impressed so I just got a loaf of dinner rolls and about four pieces of baked goods.
When I got to the car, I showed her the chicken, «Dude this looks good hu!?» So I suggested we try it right quick cause it smelled too good to not have a taste… «Hm! It’s really good! I’m gonna get another one!» and went inside to get another for her.
So basically, The Isabella Bakery got 4 stars for the chicken (otherwise it would’ve been 3)…

Cappuccino’s to die for. An absolute must if you can’t make it to Metropolis.
Also while you are there, take a crack at the strawberry empenadas. You won’t regret it.

Okay, so maybe there is a little bit of a language barrier for me when I go here. That doesn’t stop me from noshing on awesome strawberry empanadas and delicious cream-​filled chocolate long john-​type pastries.
The woman that always seems to be working the counter is very friendly, and between her broken english and my horrible spanish, we work it out.
The place is fairly small, but there are a few tables to sit at and eat.
Bonus points for everything being dirt cheap!