La Cabra Bakery

A glass case of laminated pastry, an L-shaped bar and about a dozen bakes at a time: the East Village room is small enough that the queue and the espresso machine share it. This is the first American shop from La Cabra, the Danish roaster that started in Aarhus in 2012 and opened here in October 2021, and the coffee and the pastry arrive from the same set of decisions.

Danish roasting, New York counter

La Cabra was founded by Esben Piper and began roasting its own coffee in 2013, growing from one Aarhus coffee bar into a roaster with subscribers and wholesale partners in more than sixty countries. Roasting choices are made at the cupping table, and each coffee gets a single profile meant to show its own character rather than one roast for filter and another for espresso. The bar pours pour-overs, americano, cortado, flat white, cappuccino and latte, with a hot cardamom coffee that lines up with the spiced baking and houjicha for anyone off coffee. Cups, plates and bowls are handmade Wurtz ceramics from Denmark.

A case that refills through the day

Baking runs in rounds rather than one morning batch, so the case changes as it empties: laminated doughs, sourdough loaves, cookies, danishes and buns, roughly twelve items at a time split between staples and seasonal work. The cardamom bun is the one to eat first, deep golden and laminated with crunchy sugar baked into the folds. It drew the early queues when the shop opened and it is still the house favourite, the single item most people mean when they say they are going to La Cabra.

How to build the order

After the bun, order for contrast. Pain au chocolat brings plain buttery layers and dark chocolate. The Meyer lemon and hazelnut cookie hides lemon filling under a chocolate disc. The cherry danish arrives with a milk chocolate bar across the top. Seasonal bakes get more elaborate, as with the Swedish semla the bakery ran in February 2023, a sweet bun filled with tart raspberry compote, whipped ganache, toasted almonds and icing sugar. Sourdough loaves and sugar-dusted pastries cover the take-home end. Seats fill early in a compact room, so plenty of people take a bun and a cortado to go. Opinionated About Dining listed the bakery among cheap eats in North America in 2025.