One of South Philly’s best doughnut bakeries opens a second location
The new location of Brazilian bakery Kouklet serves its fan-favorite sourdough doughnuts, cookies, and coconut cakes, as well as made-to-order tapioca flatbread.
Three years ago, baker Mardhory Santos-Cepeda brought Brazilian delicacies — from chocolate cream-filled sonhos to spiraling bolo de rolo cakes wrapped around imported guava — to South Philly. Now, the Brasilia-raised chef has expanded Kouklet & Tanda Brazilian Bakehouse to a second location featuring several signature pastries, including sonhos (sourdough doughnuts), cookies, and coconut cakes, plus a full coffee menu with Brazilian beans roasted by Herman’s and made-to-order stuffed Brazilian tapioca flatbread.
Just a 15-minute walk from its original East Passyunk Avenue location, the bakery’s new corner storefront is now open at 1429 Wolf St., painted the same shade of bright yellow as its sister shop. The building doubles as Santos-Cepeda’s commercial kitchen and a takeout bakery.
Last year was rough one financially for the 33-year-old chef. She didn’t think Kouklet (pronounced koo-clay) would make it to 2025. “We really needed to bring more income to the business,” she said. “We felt the increase of ingredients and the foot traffic was down.”
In addition, baking inside the 800-square-foot space at 1647 E. Passyunk Ave. became increasingly difficult. “It wasn’t set up to be a kitchen,” Santos-Cepeda said. “We didn’t have any ventilation system and the fire alarm would always go off.”
So she found a commercial kitchen close by for a reasonable price and moved the bakery’s production. Soon, folks in the West Passyunk neighborhood got curious.
“People would stop me and ask what was going on here,” she said. “And I would tell them and they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, you guys should open the doors.’”
Santos-Cepeda couldn’t pause production to build out a new retail counter in the 1,000-square foot kitchen, so she put a table in the entrance of the space with a few pastries and placed a menu board outside on the sidewalk. Folks started coming in, and she learned what items her neighbors were most interested in purchasing.
Now, she opens the makeshift takeout bakery from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday to Sunday for those same encouraging neighbors to stop by for baked goods and coffee.
“This place was born out of necessity from me and also from the neighbors — we both wanted something like this, so we just made it happen,” she said.
The menu here is a smaller than the original location, but it’s the only place you can get Santos-Cepeda’s crispy-chewy tapioca flatbreads — a crepelike dish Brazilians call simply “tapioca.”
It’s a popular breakfast dish in the northeast of Brazil, often filled with butter and accompanied with a coffee, Santos-Cepeda said. But at the new location, she remixes it by adding a variety of fillings and sprinkling cheese into a pan to make a crispy exterior. A layer of tapioca flour (called polvilho in Brazil) forms a starchy base on top of the cheese that’s stuffed with fillings like egg and cheese, mortadella, or shredded roast chicken, then folded quesadilla-style.
The new location also has a small selection of fresh produce for purchase. Santos-Cepeda said she envisions offering takeout lunch and dinner in the future. (She plans to launch a brunch offering of Brazilian couscous bowls made of steamed corn cakes — think a hybrid of polenta and grits — at the original location soon.)
Between working in a larger kitchen and adding the second location and seating to the original — the Passyunk Avenue shop can now seat about 15 — Kouklet’s outlook is gradually improving, Santos-Cepeda said. “Both places are working together to help the whole business.”
Kouklet & Tanda Brazilian Bakehouse, 1429 Wolf St.; kouklet.com, instagram.com/koukletbakehouse, Thursday to Sunday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.