Showstopping Filipino pastries to get a permanent home in SF

For two years, Angelica Nulud and Paul Faraon scoured real estate listings for a permanent home for La Kalidád, their hit Filipino pastry popup. After visiting properties around the Bay Area - and having a baby in the middle of it all - they finally settled on a location in San Francisco's South Beach neighborhood. 

The wife-and-husband team plan to open La Kalidád as a café-bakery at 680 A 2nd St. this fall, in time for holiday pies. That was Nulud's original specialty when she launched the business in 2021 after baking at popular businesses including Vive la Tarte and Stonemill Matcha in San Francisco. Faraon, a former cook at San Francisco's acclaimed Cotogna, fully joined the business in 2023, when they began making weekly appearances at East Bay farmers markets. 

"We're really excited to get this space," Nulud said, after having to move kitchens several times and being restricted to the popup format. "I think we're barely scratching the surface of what we can do." 

The café will showcase the owners' self-defined Filipino-Californian baking style, with seasonal pastries such as a mango sago croissant tart and calamansi blueberry cruffin. They've transmuted mais con yelo, a Filipino shaved ice and corn dessert, into croissant form, topped with sweet Brentwood corn pastry cream, malted whip and a cornflake crunch. Pies in flavors such as calamansi curd with whipped cream or turon, filled with crème brûlée and banana compote, will return for the holidays and special occasions. Specialty drinks will also showcase Filipino flavors, such as a pandan matcha, salted latik coffee and calamansi espresso tonic. 

La Kalidád will be open Wednesday to Sunday to start, with seating in a mezzanine area. Nulud said they would like to eventually open daily and expand the menu to more substantial offerings, such as breakfast sandwiches - and to continue adding more ingredients from the Philippines. 

La Kalidád was part of a wave of Filipino and Asian American bakeries that emerged from the pandemic, leading to the explosive popularity of Filipino ingredients like ube, pandan and calamansi in pastries as well as coffee. Nulud said she and Faraon are glad to see that, "but there are so many flavors we'd like to work with," she said. That could include pastries that incorporate longganisa sausage and kaldereta, a tomato-based beef stew. She would also like to make a version of crema de fruta, a sponge cake with fruit and a custard filling.

Nulud and Faraon met at cooking school in the Philippines, where they both grew up and where Nulud's grandmother ran a candy shop specializing in confections like the nougat turrones de casoy. After coming to the U.S. - Nulud with her family in 2015 and Faraon a few years later - they worked in restaurants and bakeries in the Bay Area and then were both part of the opening team at Tartine Manufactory in Los Angeles in 2019. After returning to the Bay Area, Faraon worked in the corporate kitchens of Salesforce and Meta, where Nulud also worked briefly right before the pandemic hit. 

Stuck at home and having just returned from a vacation in the Philippines, Nulud started baking ensaymadas, a brioche-like bun, and pies with ube and other Filipino flavors for friends and family. Soon, she started popping up in San Francisco and the Peninsula and pursuing a longtime dream to create croissants and other laminated pastries that incorporate Filipino and Asian flavors. For La Kalidád, she initially rolled out pie crusts and layered butter into croissant dough by hand - a physical feat to do at scale - before investing in a dough sheeter to automatically roll and press it.

"Croissants are a labor of love," she said, noting how popular and wide-ranging they've become in the Bay Area. "It's really interesting seeing how people put their experience and background into the craft."  

In 2023, the couple landed spots at the San Ramon and Newark farmers markets, where their baked goods developed a loyal following. They eventually expanded into selling wholesale to some cafés. They plan to continue selling at the farmers markets at least until the new bakery gets established.

Nulud is happy to see the foods she and Faraon grew up with being celebrated in the Bay Area, through the popularity of Filipino bakeries and upscale restaurants such as San Francisco's Abacá and the fine-dining Naides, which just won its first Michelin star. 

"I feel like our food has been underrepresented for so long," she said. "Our culture is a melting pot for so many flavors because we have been colonized for so long. We feel really proud seeing all these businesses gaining recognition."

La Kalidád. Opening fall. 680 A 2nd St., San Francisco. lakalidad.com

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