Kukje Supermarket didn’t have enough room to make its own baked goods and previously sold pastries from a San Jose bakery. With the new Daly City café, it joins a wave of new bakeries specializing in Korean or Korean-inspired baked goods, such as those that specialize in salt bread — the buttery, crispy rolls that got their start in Japan but grew into a social media frenzy in Korea and, more recently, in the Bay Area.
Kukje Supermarket announced it would open the bakery last May, a few months after the debut of Jagalchi, a 75,000-square-foot Korean market that opened with great fanfare nearby in Daly City. Jagalchi has its own in-house bakery, Basquia, which focuses on baked goods made with rice flour, such as sulpang, a soft Korean bread.
Similar to the fast-growing Korean chain Paris Baguette, Kukje Bakery offers a mix of classic Korean and French pastries, such as coffee buns — soft, brioche-like rolls with a crisp coffee coating — and almond croissants. Layer cakes topped with glazed fruit, cookies and other buns fill its wooden cabinets, and the bakery serves hot and iced espresso drinks, as well as drip coffee, in a roomy sit-down café.