Pastelería Ideal

Pastelería Ideal is a downtown institution. Don Adolfo Fernández opened a small bread shop in the historic centre in 1927, and it grew into one of the best-known bakeries in Mexico, with its main store on Calle 16 de Septiembre in a building that was once part of the temple and former convent of San Francisco. Today it has branches on República de Uruguay in the centre and in Valle de Aragón, Ciudad Azteca and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl in the State of Mexico, as well as a factory in San Antonio Abad where the largest cakes are made. México Desconocido calls it a small shop that became an icon of Mexican baking.

Downstairs is the bakery. The range of pan dulce is huge: conchas, cuernos, banderillas, campechanas, orejas, panqués, pan danés and dry pastries, along with cakes, flans and biscuits. The scale is part of the experience, and early in the morning you will see the cafeteros, resellers who wait outside from around 5:00 to buy big blue-and-white boxes of bread to resell.

Upstairs is something unusual: the Museo del Pastel, a showroom of hundreds of display cakes for birthdays, weddings and baptisms. Each one carries a technical sheet naming the baker who made it, and customers come here to choose a design and order their own. Even if you are not planning a celebration, it is an entertaining room to wander through. There is also a café on site.

Flans and biscuits are sold alongside the bread and cakes, so it is easy to put together a mixed selection to share. A bag of pan dulce from here makes a good breakfast for the next morning or a snack to share during a day of sightseeing. Allow 20 to 30 minutes to look around both floors.

The store is on 16 de Septiembre in the historic centre, so it fits naturally into a walk around the centre. Dulcería de Celaya, the historic sweet shop on 5 de Mayo, is in the same part of the centro, and together they make a sweet-toothed detour from the cathedral and the museums nearby.