Huckleberry Café & Bakery

Maple bacon biscuits, coffeecake veined with brown sugar streusel, doughnuts, tarts and proper butter croissants: the Huckleberry case is unapologetically rich, and it sets the terms for the rest of the menu. The Santa Monica bakery and daytime cafe grew out of weekend breakfast pop-ups, and it has kept the pop-up's bias toward baking ever since.

Pop-ups to a Santa Monica bakery

Zoe Nathan and Josh Loeb opened Huckleberry in February 2009 as part of the Rustic Canyon Family. It started when Nathan, then pastry chef at Rustic Canyon Wine Bar & Seasonal Kitchen, began running weekend breakfasts there and built a following for her baked goods and doughnuts. Her route through Lupa in New York, Joe's in Venice, Tartine in San Francisco and bld in Los Angeles shows in the style, which favours hands-on work, repetition and abundance over restraint. Laurel Almerinda, hired by Nathan with no previous pastry experience, is now a partner who helps lead the case and co-wrote the 2014 book Huckleberry: Stories, Secrets and Recipes from our Kitchen with Nathan and Loeb.

A farmers' market menu built around the case

The nearby Santa Monica Farmers' Market shapes the savoury half: egg dishes, sandwiches and salads that change with what is good, alongside muffins, scones, doughnuts, tarts and croissants. Bacon cheddar muffins and flaky maple bacon biscuits sit on the savoury-sweet line the kitchen likes best. A small marketplace carries the same logic out the door with organic produce, housemade dressings, salsas and pestos, baking mixes and take-and-bake items. Coffee comes from Caffe Luxxe, the Los Angeles roaster, in a partnership going back to Rustic Canyon's early years.

What to order

Work through the case first. The maple bacon biscuit is the clearest statement of the house style, the brown sugar streusel coffeecake and a butter croissant cover plainer ground, and doughnuts, tarts, scones and muffins carry the seasonal variations that come off the market stalls. If the visit is a meal, the egg dishes and sandwiches do the job without displacing the bakery. The room is a country kitchen in feel, with hand-tinted photographs on the walls, wooden tables and slightly rickety chairs, and it is busy enough that a line is normal rather than a surprise. Opinionated About Dining marked Huckleberry highly recommended among North American cheap eats in 2026, after placing it at #128 in 2025.