San Martín Bakery & Restaurant Opens Lovely New Location in Addison

Started in 1974 in Guatemala before expanding to El Salvador and finally arriving in the U.S. in 2018 on McKinney Avenue in Uptown Dallas, San Martín Restaurant & Bakery has made its mark in North Texas. It was named Readers’ Choice for Best Bakery in the Observer's most recent Best of Dallas issue. This international spot is more than a bakery, however, offering up breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner fare as well.

A second location opened in August in Addison, so we dropped in recently for a spur-of-the-moment brunch outing.
Upon entering you’re greeted with shelves and shelves of freshly baked goods such as chocolate croissants, cinnamon rolls, palmiers, grissini, cookies and a myriad of savory bread in several forms. It really isn’t fair, and we knew this would also tempt and taunt us when we left.
But we soldiered on and were seated at a table in the open and inviting dining room in an atrium-like area full of soothing natural light near the large square marble-faced bar that served as a focal point.
As soon as we were seated, we were brought a basket with several varieties of freshly baked traditional Guatemalan bread. A pleasant surprise, but a dangerous one, as it’s so easy to fill up on this. We vowed to not fall for that trap, but a few minutes later the empty bread bowl would prove otherwise.
We ordered an orange mimosa, which comes with a hand-crafted bracelet around the stem. It reminded us of the frozen margaritas at JT McCords that would come with a garter belt around the massive stem way back in the day just a few blocks from where we now sat. During happy hour they’d bring you two glasses at once. It was a simpler, if more dangerous time.

Back to the present: The menu is rather extensive, with breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner options available, but we finally decided on two breakfasts: the eggs Florentine and the dobladas breakfast.

The tl;dr for the eggs Florentine is that it was one of the best things we’ve had this year. It’s two eggs cooked to order nestled inside a hollowed-out campesino roll, topped with a wonderful Florentine sauce made with fresh spinach and mushrooms. The bread was light and flaky, the sauce rich and creamy, and it all looks beautiful on the plate. It’s almost a shame to cut into it all, but when you do, you’re rewarded with more sauce and the almost forgotten eggs, over easy in this example, with perfectly cooked yolks escaping the confinement with the sauce.
The dobladas promised to be a classic Guatemalan-style breakfast, consisting of refried beans, plantains, two corn tortillas filled with gooey cheese, topped with two eggs and ranchera sauce. Everything worked on the plate, and the ranchera sauce was colorful and bright, both in flavor and visual impact.
After we finished, we made our way once again through the minefield that is the bakery section near the entrance, and inspired by memories of our bathroom scale, we exited.

But we’ll be back.

5407 Belt Line Road, Addison; Sunday – Wednesday, 7 a.m. – 9 p.m.; Thursday – Saturday, 7 a.m. – 10 p.m.