Toña Bakery: conchas and caramels in Dunbar

Toña Bakery & Café announces itself from down the block on Vancouver‘s Dunbar Street. A bright orange awning runs the length of the brick front, a blue door opens beside the window, and on sunny days orange folding chairs sit around a small blue bistro table on the sidewalk, next to pots of flowers. Behind the glass, Venezuelan-born pastry chef Daniel Muñoz bakes conchas, cachitos and laminated pastries and makes his own chocolates and caramels, all for a neighbourhood that started knocking on the door well before the shop was ready to open.

A chocolatier who wanted to bake too

The chef grew up in Venezuela and moved to Canada about 15 years ago, already set on pastry. He trained at George Brown College in Toronto, then a job offer brought him west, and he has been in Vancouver since 2015. Over the years he moved between chocolate shops, bakeries and cafés, including Beta5, Hawksworth and Nemesis, and each job kept part of the craft out of reach: a bakery left no room for chocolate work, and a chocolate shop left no room for baking. He wanted to do all of it, so a place of his own made sense. His mother had paved the way long before, with a shop of her own.

That shop was called Tonia’s. In Venezuela, Tonia is the usual nickname for Antonieta, which is his mother’s middle name, and the bakery’s name plays on it. The ñ in Toña ties the name to the family surname and to Spanish, his first language. It trips up plenty of customers at first, but for the owner it carries everything he wanted the place to be: a bakery where his heritage is part of everyday life.

Winter chocolate, summer ice cream

Toña started as a pop-up. The plan was simple: chocolate in the winter, ice cream in the summer, and plated desserts served at friends’ cafés around the city. After two or three years of pop-ups, the search for a permanent space began, and it led to a residential stretch of the west side.

When the right space came up, his parents believed in the project enough to back him, and that support helped turn years of pop-ups into a shop of his own.

From conchas to kinako dragées

The counter holds about 20 different items each day. Around 15 of them are regulars, though even those keep evolving. The Latin American side of the menu shows in the concha, the sweet bun with its crackly sugar shell, and in the cachito, the Venezuelan ham-filled roll. The laminated pastry covers almond croissants and pains au chocolat, alongside a black sesame and orange kouign-amann with deep, caramelized layers. Pecan sticky buns and canelés round out the case.

Summer changes the rhythm. The chef has worked with some of the same farmers for close to 10 years, and in peak season whatever they bring in gets turned into something, from two to four different fruit danishes at a time to fruit tarts on the dessert side.

Next to the pastry case, the chocolate side of his training finally gets its share of the counter. Toña makes its chocolates and caramels in house, along with black sesame kinako dragées, and the collections change with the occasions, Valentine’s Day included. The coffee is in the hands of his partner, Cosette Bote, a former barista who also runs the front of house. She rotates through local roasters and small producers, with Spanish lattes and matcha lattes alongside the espresso classics.

A neighbourhood that didn’t wait for the sign

There was some worry about how the neighbourhood would take to the bakery. Nothing on the counter is fussy, but it is also not the standard lineup of a corner bakery with half a dozen kinds of cookies. The answer came during the renovation, while the windows were still covered in paper and neighbours kept knocking to ask what was coming. The team held a friends-and-family day before opening and chose not to put up a private-event sign, so people from the street simply kept walking in. Many of the faces from that day now come back to Toña four or five times a week.

On weekdays, the neighbourhood makes a stop: people on their way to work, parents dropping by after the school run. On weekends, Toña becomes more of a destination, drawing people from across the city who make the trip out to Dunbar.

Whoever walks in, the room catches the eye right away. The orange and blue from the storefront carry inside, with a tangerine ceiling and electric blue accents set against light, neutral walls, and everything else is kept simple: natural wood, a few green plants, a two-tiered bench lined with blue cushions. Mornings here move to the rhythm of a true corner bakery: a coffee on the way to work, a concha tucked into a paper bag for later, a few words exchanged across the counter. Under the orange awning on Dunbar Street, his own story shows up in the name above the door and in the buns behind the glass.

Written by Marie-Françoise Malo
Photography by Coshiela Bote

Updated on November 09, 2026

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