Koreatown, the block of 32nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, is a densely packed smorgasbord of Korean food. With restaurants lined up side by side and stacked on top of each other, the competition for your stomach and your wallet is intense. You can choose from Korean cafeterias, tiny kimbap joints, Korean-Chinese restaurants, multi-level eateries with elaborate waterfalls, and on and on. And among that glorious hodgepodge, you find Korean bakeries stuffed with over-the-top sweet and savory specialties. If you want to understand what makes a living, morphing fusion cuisine, Paris Baguette is a good place to start. More

We're soup dumpling-mad. When we go to a Shanghai-style Chinese restaurant, all too often we order soup dumplings, perhaps before we even sit down. But sometimes it pays to slow down and pay attention to the rest of the dumpling menu. On a recent visit to the excellent Shanghai Café Deluxe, our eyes lit on something called rice ball with pork in soup ($3.95). What a novel idea—dumplings in soup, rather than dumplings with soup inside them. More

There are three things you need to know about Indian-Chinese food. First, it has as much to do with Chinese food—as served in China—as Chinese-American food. Next, it's all about the sauces: Manchurian, Chili, and so on. And last, if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the restaurant. More

The New Amsterdam Market was a slice of bread heaven last Sunday. Fifteen of the city's best bakeries offered a dizzying array of delicious loaves, many of them created just for this event. The occasion was the market's Bread Pavilion, designed to showcase flours made from wheat grown by regional farmers. "We brought in bakers not normally in the market in celebration of local grains," said New Amsterdam founder Robert LaValva. The bakers came to support the farmers, and to compete. As Keith Cohen of Orwasher's said, "I brought my A game." More

The Ironbound district of Newark is a pancake-flat trapezoid hemmed in between the city's downtown, the Passaic River, and the highway. For almost a century, it's been home to a thriving Portuguese community, rivaled in size only by Massachusetts communities like Fall River and New Bedford. The Ironbound's main drag, Ferry Street, is lined with Portuguese, Spanish, and Brazilian restaurants selling platters of paella, barbecue, and the like. If you want a bite of something just as Iberian but not so gut-busting, head to Teixeira's Bakery, with two stores in the Ironbound. The line to the counter is often forty deep, but it's worth the wait. More

For the last quarter century or so, much of New York City has been a German bread desert. The only way to get a loaf of freshly made bauernbrot was to trek out to Central Queens, where neighborhoods like Ridgewood and Middle Village still cling to vestiges of German ethnic tradition. Luckily, however, tastes change, and that's where David Rothe and Volker Herrmann saw their opportunity. More

Occupying a Midwood storefront a short block from the F train station on Avenue P, Chiffon's represents almost a century of Jewish baking tradition. More

With his burly physique, shaved head, and cauliflower ears, Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria's head baker looks like the wrong kind of guy you'd want to meet down a back alley in Bordeaux. And you'd be right: as a youth in France, Kamel Saci was a professional judo champion. But in his basement bakery, a completely different side to his personality comes out. For Kamel, dough is not an opponent to be beaten into submission; it responds best to a minimum of handling, the gentler the better. The results show his techniques work. Il Buco's ovens produce some of the crustiest and most flavorsome artisan loaves in the city. More

If you want to judge the state of bread in New York, a good place to start is the bread counter at Dean & DeLuca's main store at Broadway and Prince Street. Here you find a wide selection of great loaves both haute and earthy, from the latest Manhattan artisan sensation to old school breads from the farthest reaches of the outer boroughs. More

Latvians love their dense, dark rye bread. Latvian-Americans love it so much that they have it shipped over from the old country in loaves weighing over 17 pounds. It goes fast, because it's their staff of life, a necessary accompaniment to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A number of mail order businesses have sprung up to cater to this community. Last year, Baltic Shop teamed up with the famous Laci bakery in Riga to sell their top quality breads in the United States under the Storye ("stor-eye") brand name. They're so good they might even wean Manhattanites from their baguettes. More

Flour, water, yeast, and salt. Back in 1903, a Neapolitan immigrant named Joe Parisi opened the Parisi Bakery at 198 Mott Street in Little Italy. The residents of that stretch of Mott were almost all from the Naples area, and Joe baked for them the kind of loaves that they knew from the old country. More

How do you invent a new loaf? Grandaisy Bakery is known for its white, Italian-style breads. But after they opened a store on the Upper West Side, they sensed a demand for a "health" loaf. More

Talk about crust. That's the first thing you notice about Sullivan Street Bakery's breads. Here's bakery founder and owner Jim Lahey: "The crust of bread has to do with how bread is cooked. The crust is something that forms during the cooling process. I like cooking things to their highest expression. I like the contrast of soft and crunchy. I like to taste the by-products of lacto-fermentation in dough. That's what gives a unique flavor to the crust." More

The aroma of good bread wafts from beneath the rumbling commuter trains over Park Avenue in East Harlem. The smell comes from behind the moribund stalls of East Harlem's La Marqueta, where a half dozen bakers hustle loaves in and out of stainless steel ovens. This is the nerve center of Hot Bread Kitchen, the immigrant women's baking collective that produces some of the city's most eclectic and exciting loaves. Serious Eats has already lauded its puffy, scrumptious bialys; now let's look at the rest of its offerings. More

The yeasty heart of the Daniel Boulud empire is hidden at the end of an East Village alley, through an unmarked door, and down a long, brightly-lit corridor. There, amid a phalanx of stainless steel ovens, mixers, and other machines, genial master baker Mark Fiorentino and his team of assistants turn out a dizzying array of breads for Boulud's half dozen restaurants. More

It's worth going to the chain's Bleecker Street branch, where they've installed a glassed-in bakery right inside the entrance. Here bread is front and center, and behind the counter are stacks of some of the most interesting loaves in the city. More

There's a trio of cartoon skeletons dancing on the window of a bakery on Brooklyn's 4th Avenue. Just inside the door, you find an elaborate altar decorated with sugar skulls, comic skeleton figures, bottles of tequila, photographs of deceased relatives, candles, crosses, and round loaves of sweet bread decorated with bone designs. This is how the family that owns Don Paco Lopez, maybe the city's oldest and certainly its best known Mexican bakery, celebrates the lives of its ancestors. More

In July, he opened his bakery, La Boulangerie, in Forest Hills. It's evidently a good-bread-deprived neighborhood, because on weekends the line is out the door. More

For Amy Scherber, it was the loaf that launched her bakery. More

The scent of drying grain wafts from the door of Coney Island's New York Bread bakery. The aroma emanates from the cooling room, where rack after rack of dark rye and wheat loaves wait to be bagged and shipped. For Brooklyn's Russian community, that smell is the essence of the homeland, of rolling fields of wheat and rye baking in the summer sun. More

When I went out to restaurants as a child, my parents would warn me, "Don't fill up on the bread basket." At Vandaag, the East Village's Dutch-Scandinavian eatery, it's hard not to do just that. You seem them on nearly every table, the porcelain bowls overflowing with slabs of bread and billowing sheets of crisps. Accompanied with a flight of Danish beer, the bread makes an excellent cocktail-hour meal, especially when smeared with Vandaag's gin-scented butter and lemon-eggplant spread. More

At Bien Cuit, his new Smith Street bakery, Zachary Golper is assembling a team of top-notch "bread hands." By that, he means workers with hands that are "delicate but strong and dexterous" and with an instinct for shaping dough. Serious Eats has already documented his lovely tarts, croissants, and sandwiches. Here we're going to celebrate Bien Cuit's breads. More

Today, John Melngailis is a partner in Black Rooster Food, which makes and sells unapologetic Latvian rye just like his mother's. The first thing you notice about his Baltic Rye is that it's heavy and dense. A whole loaf weighs five pounds and is enough to feed a party of 50. Luckily, it's sold in 17-ounce sections that can keep a family in canapés for at least a week. The Baltic Rye's crust is as black as coal but surprisingly not bitter, while the crumb is tightly packed and a bit moist. It's made from 100 percent rye flour, sourdough leavening, rye malt, sugar, salt, and caraway seeds. More

The goods that come out of the Scratch Bread ovens are the baked equivalent of one of those Robert Rauschenberg paintings that combines found objects with carefully haphazard splashes of color. Bite into one of their sweet and greasy plantain bread cakes, and you could discover surprises like a whole dried chili pepper or a coffee bean. More

A bakery grows in a shipping container in a Brooklyn yard. That yard is part of the Bushwick compound of Roberta's Pizza, whose business seems to grow and morph every day. At first, the bakery used the pizza oven during the few, early morning hours it wasn't churning out pies. Last year, the restaurant hired master oven artisan Dick Bessey to build a big wood-fired oven in one of the many shipping containers that clutter its yard. In November, the restaurant brought in Melissa Weller, who has a resume that includes stints as head baker at Per Se and Bouchon as well as work at Sullivan Street and Babbo. The loaves that she pulls out of the oven every morning rival any in the city. More