By Jen Murphy
Photography by Trevor Triano
In spring, summer, and fall, Aspen is a brunch town. But come winter, scoring first tracks takes priority over a Bloody Mary and eggs Benedict. Carbs are key to fueling a morning of adventures, and the town’s bakeries and restaurants provide plenty of options for delicious, on-the-go sustenance, both sweet and savory. Here are the cult favorites that often sell out before the gondola starts spinning.
Sant Ambroeus
Milan’s iconic cafe was founded in 1936 and has become a mini empire with outposts in New York City and the Hamptons, Palm Beach, and, as of 2023, downtown Aspen. The elegant space includes a coffee bar meant for on-the-fly bites. While best known for its gorgeous cakes, its breakfast pastries are equally delicious (and almost too pretty to eat). An Italian twist on the croissant, the chocolate cornetto is filled with pastry cream and Valrhona dark chocolate, and is easy to nibble on the chair lift.
Paradise Bakery
One of the town’s beloved originals, family-owned Paradise Bakery has been serving made-from-scratch recipes since 1976. The head baker typically arrives at 3 a.m. to ensure that fresh-from-the-oven muffins, cinnamon rolls, and croissants are on the counter when the doors open at 6:30 a.m. Because the croissants are so labor intensive, only one batch of roughly 250 is made each day. The buttery, flaky pastries come in more than a half-dozen variations, from a ham-and-cheese-stuffed version to a blueberry-cream-cheese-filled riff on a cheese Danish. The bestseller, however, is the chocolate croissant made with bittersweet chocolate and drizzled with a rich fudge icing.
Paradise Bakery’s best-selling chocolate croissants almost always sell out. The few croissants still on the shelves at Paradise Bakery after 12:30 p.m. are deeply discounted so the team can make room for its equally delicious cookies. The bakery also sells homemade gelato and coffee drinks in the afternoon and into the evening.
Silvers Bagel Bar and Peak Provisions
Last summer, Aspen welcomed its first New York City–worthy bagel shop. At Silvers, each bagel starts with the essentials done right: high-quality flour, rich malt syrup, and a custom water filtration system designed to scientifically match the mineral balance of New York City’s singular tap water. The result is a dough that ferments properly and bakes into the quintessential glossy, golden Manhattan bagel. Hand-rolled and boiled in-house, they have the Goldilocks texture that’s both chewy and crisp. About 450 bagels are baked each day. A standout is the caviar bagel—briny pearls layered over silky herbed cream cheese on a warm bagel. It’s equal parts luxury and comfort.
Louis Swiss Bakery
This local institution in the Aspen Airport Business Center has been around since 1982, when Renee Tornare brought his Swiss family’s baking concept to Aspen. Today, it’s the Western Slope’s largest full-scale bakery, selling its goods to local restaurants and at the Aspen Saturday farmers market. In 2021, MML Hospitality (the company behind Clark’s Oyster Bar) took over management and brought on pastry chef Jennifer Tucker. She’s stayed true to classics while adding exciting new creations, like the Nutella morning bun, which is layered with swirls of chocolate hazelnut spread and dressed in sugar, and the apple Jesus, a Louis Swiss specialty that looks like a muffin but is made with croissant dough, filled with apples, baked, and then topped with a crumble. Her gooey cinnamon rolls are made from croissant dough so they taste extra rich. She generously slathers them in cream cheese frosting while they’re still warm so a sugary glaze melts into the layers of cinnamon.
Swedish Hill Cafe
In 2024, an outpost of Austin’s sensational Swedish Hill Bakery quietly opened on the rooftop of the Aspen Art Museum. The Scandi sleek space is overseen by Louis Swiss’s pastry wiz Jennifer Tucker. You can find her decadent cinnamon rolls here, as well as her addictive croissants, which come in sweet and savory varieties—the standout is the pistachio. Her riff on baklava is filled with a mix of pistachios, pecans, and honey, baked to crispy, crackly perfection, then brushed with honey and sprinkled with more pistachios.
Element 47 and Aspen Collection Cafe
The kouign-amann (pronounced kween-a-mahn), served at The Little Nell’s Element 47 restaurant, tastes like “a croissant on steroids,” says pastry chef Barbara Marcos. The name translates to “butter cake” and its croissant-like dough is layered with loads of butter and sugar. When it bakes, those layers bubble up, creating a sticky, caramelized crust around the impossibly flaky interiors. If chocolate is your weakness, don’t miss Marcos’s chocolate babka. “I use a mix of Valrhona milk and dark chocolates to get a perfect sweet-bitter taste,” she says. Those with gluten allergies won’t be disappointed by her super-moist banana bread, which gets its deep flavor from brown butter. “It’s perfect to slip into your pocket for skiing,” she says. Marcos is also responsible for the baked goods sold at Aspen Collection Cafe, located just behind the steps on the Lower Gondola Plaza. Her homemade Pop-Tarts change flavors seasonally and are so slope-friendly that The Little Nell serves them aboard its Friday snowcat experience.
Barbara Marcos, pastry chef at The Little Nell, develops more than 30 new recipes per year. Her kouign-amann and Pop-Tarts, which come in seasonal flavors, are crowd favorites.