‘Bodega Bakes’ Is a Dessert-Driven Love Letter to the Corner Stores of Paola Velez’s Childhood

When Paola Velez learned she was a F&W Best New Chef in 2021, she initially turned down the honor. She had received several accolades that year for her Dominican-influenced pastry programs at Kith/Kin, Compass Rose, and Maydan in Washington, D.C., as well as for Bakers Against Racism, a grassroots collective that organizes global bake sales to raise money for social justice causes worldwide, which she founded in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

“My fear was that I was rising too quickly without any stabilizing forces in my life,” Velez recalls. She was also concerned that she was only getting recognition because Bakers Against Racism addressed such a timely cause. “I felt like, ‘Is it just a fad, or is it my work?’” Eventually, though, Velez came to realize that Bakers Against Racism was successful because people trusted her as a pastry chef.

"“People were already paying attention to what I had to say. But then once I became a Best New Chef, it made me an authority in the industry.”"

Paola Velez

Ultimately, she accepted the Best New Chef award, and in doing so, she gained new mentors from the BNC alumni network and received an even larger platform for her social media presence, nonprofit work, and one-of-a-kind desserts.

“People were already paying attention to what I had to say. But then once I became a Best New Chef, it made me an authority in the industry,” she says. “[Being named a] Best New Chef gave me this unique voice.”

Related: 18 Dessert Recipes by Paola Velez, From a Stunning Citrus Pie to Platanos Foster

That voice shines through bright and clear in Velez’s debut cookbook, Bodega Bakes, which has landed on countless best-of lists since hitting shelves in October. The book is a dessert-driven love letter to Velez’s upbringing in the Bronx, where “the bodega is the cornerstone of every neighborhood,” Velez says.

Memories of her local bodega led to recipes like Chocolate Malta Cake, inspired by the nonalcoholic malt soda, and a Cosmic Brownie–influenced whoopie pie. There are also tributes to her Dominican heritage, like a recipe for a three-tiered Dominican-style cake, filled with dulce de leche and guava paste that she grew up ordering from Bizcocho de Colores in Upper Manhattan, and playful desserts like her Coquito Cheesecake, giving the Puerto Rican beverage a dessert form.

It’s not just the flavors of bodega treats that Velez wanted to come through in the book. When she was a young line cook and didn’t have the money for anything beyond a Nutrament protein drink and a bread roll, her local bodega owner would always feed her, no questions asked. Velez wants to spread that spirit of generosity to her readers. “We write cookbooks for the home cook,” says Velez. “A lot of my book is about accessibility and demystifying the baking process.”

She plans to continue that work with an upcoming newsletter, Steal This Recipe, where she will teach chefs and home cooks alike “how to re-create viral recipes to make them uniquely their own.”

Offline, Velez opened neighborhood bar Providencia last December in D.C., in partnership with her longtime friend, chef Erik Bruner-Yang, and veteran bartenders Pedro Tobar and Daniel Gonzalez. The menu includes influences from Dominican, Salvadorean, and Taiwanese cuisines, reflecting their various backgrounds.

“The cool thing is that these cultures have a lot of common ground,” she says. That cultural Venn diagram manifests in dishes like tamales with Japanese curry, strawberry and cheese pupusas, sweet plaintain tiramisu, and a show-stopping Baked Alaska kakigori, topped with a Dominican meringue that is torched to order. The drinks are no less creative, from a mezcal and Campari cocktail inspired by the volcanoes in El Salvador to the pandan-infused Lights of the Night Market, created with the neon street markets of Taipei in mind.

It’s a personal and playful menu that Velez hopes will resonate in a town like D.C. “Now more than ever, it’s needed to have safe spaces where people can come and enjoy [a meal],” she says.

In all of her endeavors, Velez is trying to embody a new role model for chefs: “I hope that I can maintain kindness,” she says. “That the legacy of the ‘rockstar chef’ dies down and the legacy of the quirky, kind chef arises.”

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