Cat Ba Family Bakery

Each day during our time in Cat Ba, usually directly following a meal, we would go visit the Cat Ba Family Bakery. While I don’t remember seeing any label outside, this is the name I found for it online and I’m pretty sure this was the only bakery on the island. Lucky for us, it was just two doors down from where we were staying. I have a daily need for sweets and this place certainly made it easier to fill that need. If we lost any weight during Tet (when less food was available), this certainly helped us make up for it.

Varied Selection

The selection at the bakery varied by the time of day, but generally included donuts, brownies, and various pastries and cakes, including coconut, pineapple, and banana cake. I found some of the pastries to be a bit dry for my taste, but the donuts were quite good, especially fresh. They were heavier and bread-ier than the standard donut we are used to, and were covered in chocolate.

The cakes were hit or miss, with most looking slightly better than they tasted. The frosting was pretty good on some of the more standard cakes.

There’s More Than Just Sweets

Bakery items are not the only food item the bakery sells, though. There is also regular food: mostly sandwiches/bahn mis (are all sandwiches called bahn mis in Vietnam?) which included some combination of eggs, ham, cheese, and bacon. Kyle had an egg sandwich on a couple occasions and told me they were good. While I didn’t try the sandwiches due to my aversion to meat and eggs, I did enjoy their fresh bread.

Prices were quite reasonable, at least at the time of our visit (February-March, 2016.) Fresh bread was about 15,000VND (~$0.67) and most pastries were somewhere between 10,000VND-20,000VND ($0.45-$0.85.) The sandwiches were not much more.

Easy For Take-Out

Aside from Kyle and his sandwiches, we rarely actually ate our food at the physical bakery, though it would be a nice place to have breakfast if you’re a morning person as there is also tea and coffee available. We generally just picked out a few items from the bakery which they packaged up and put in a bag. We’d bring them to our room where we would work and snack on them. We’d also occasionally pick up a water bottle as we were not provided with any drinking water at our hotel.

~B~