BEST BAKERY

BEST BAKERYDelicias de España4016 Red Road

South Miami

305-669-4485 The espresso machine starts steaming up at 7:00 a.m., as sleepy-eyed patrons straggle in for any number of luscious Spanish breakfast pastries. Some head to the bakery counter and take their meal on the run; others settle in at one of 65 seats in the café and slowly savor a dish of eggs scrambled with Serrano ham. As the morning moves on, many more people will partake of the gorgeous desserts that positively glitter in their glass display cases; or take cakes and boxed pastries home; or carry out loaves of ciabatta, baguette, or chewy Galician bread; or perhaps purchase some of the fresh fish flown in from Spain (they cook these fish up too, about as well as anyone but for a lower price). The seats will keep turning over as diners luxuriate over dreamy crema catalanas and flans, charlottes and mousses, and individual fruit-and-custard pastries that would make a French tart blush with envy (generally about $2.50 each). You may have to take a number and wait awhile on the weekends, because the space becomes electrified with the anticipatory energy of overflow crowds. For seven years (which is how long Ernesto Llerandi and Isabel Miranda have owned the shop,) the secret has been spreading until it's hardly news anymore: Delicias is one hell of a great bakery, fish market, restaurant, and café. And that's just the half of it: The other half, accessible from indoors, is an extensively stocked Spanish-import shop with chorizos, cheeses, and more than 200 wines, sherries, and ports. Now, honestly, doesn't all of this make the bakery that you frequent seem sort of inadequate?