Bakery moving to McKinley Park building that’s getting new lease on life

A new source for puff pastry and other goods is coming to the Southwest Side.

Cadinho Bakery is moving into a flatiron building in McKinley Park that’s getting a new lease on life.

The triangle-shaped building at 3479 S. Archer Ave. has been vacant since 2020. Construction recently began to rehab it, and the Portuguese bakery is the first tenant to sign a lease. It will occupy the building’s first-floor, right where Archer, 35th Street and Hoyne Avenue intersect.

For Maria Alejandra Rivera, the woman behind the bakery, it’s a big step for the venture she’s been running out of her home using any available DIY hack, including an electric blanket.

“You’d laugh at the creative things you come up with to get the right temperature for baking at home,” Rivera said.

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She began in early 2021. On a neighborhood Facebook page, she offered to make bola de bolach — a Portuguese cake consisting of cookies, stacked up and soaked in espresso, covered with coffee buttercream frosting.

At that point she had had some training but no professional experience.

The cake turned out well, and soon others asked for other Portuguese goods, especially pastel de nata, an egg tart that’s the “national pastry of Portugal,” Rivera said.

She learned to make it while living in the country, where she and her husband had moved in 2018. They were still there when the pandemic hit. During lockdown, seeking a way to relax, “I went into the baking hole everyone else went into,” she said.

It soon became a way to cope with another difficult prospect at the time — that of returning to the United States, which the couple had decided to do for family reasons, but which Rivera wasn’t ready for.

She liked Portugal and its culture, especially its emphasis on spending time with loved ones over good, unpretentious food. It reminded her of Honduras, where Rivera is from.

Opening a Portuguese bakery, she realized, could be a way to hold on to the country. So she learned as much as she could while living there.

By the time they moved to Chicago, in the summer of 2020, her sense of urgency to open a bakery faded a bit — until an aunt in Honduras died that December.

“Her death pushed me, because I know she would have been really proud and excited about this project,” Rivera said.

Baking also became a way to honor her. Rivera had always admired her aunt’s eye for detail and ability to turn humble ingredients into something exquisite.

“That’s why Portuguese cuisine and I connect in that way,” she said.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

She thinks of her aunt especially when making mil folhas, a Portuguese version of mille feuille, a treat made from delicate layers of puff pastry topped with a marbled chocolate icing on top.

Mil folhas, pastel de nata and bola de bolacha will all be on the menu at the upcoming location, as well as other staples, such as palmiers and coconut and marzipan tarts.

She also plans to add coffee, breakfast and lunch options, and possibly smoothies typical of Honduras. In the meantime, she’ll continue to bake out of her house in McKinley Park, and people can order her goods via Instagram.

For McKinley Park residents, the brick-and-mortar location will be an overdue and welcome addition to the neighborhood.

“People want to see more family-owned businesses and mom-and-pop type shops that they can walk to,” said John Belcik, president of the McKinley Park Development Council.

The lifelong McKinley Park resident said a number of bakeries and coffee shops have come and gone over the years, but he feels there’s a distinct void for one today.

“We’re all really excited for a bakery to show back up,” he said.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

In all, the three-story building has about 14,000 square feet of space, according to the owners, R.P. Fox and Associates.

Work on the building is continuing, but the exact date the bakery can move in remains unclear.

In addition to the bakery, the building owners are looking for two commercial tenants, said Cesar “Auggie” Pedroza, the general contractor overseeing the rehab. Upstairs will be 10 two-bedroom apartments, each with a washer and dryer. He said he expects the renovation to take less than a year and the apartments to be available for rent in about a year.

“What was becoming an eyesore for the community is going to become an outstanding building,” Pedroza said.

Michael Loria is a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South and West sides.