Guatemalan Shake-up in Logan Square

When I wrote the cheap-eats article for Time Out, I had intended to include Delicias Guatemalteco, the bakery at Kedzie and Wellington. I showed up on two separate occasions, each time to find them either on the verge of closing or boarded up tight. So, it didn't make it into the article, although I considered their potato-ey tamales and interesting guatemalan breads an excellent value.

A week after I tried and failed to eat there, I noticed that the place was still boarded up. Every day on my way to Wilmette I'd drive by the forlorn accordion steel gate, always shuttered and think fondly back to days of paches, chuchitos and fresh longaniza.

A month later, a sign went up at Whipple & Diversey - Guatelinda Bakery, Grand Opening Soon, se solocitan panadero con esperienza. I figured the place had moved and was set to reopen.

Well they opened last week and I've been twice - it's not the same place in different digs. It's a whole other family that lives on the second floor, the mother and father man the kitchen, the daughter handles the register. It was just coincidence that they started their business as one very similar one was closing.

They have a wide range of canned and dried guatemalan foods - including black beans, central american dried chinese style noodles, dried hibiscus blossoms, and other herbs, and a octopus-looking vegetable (suckers and all) pickled in jars that the owners tell me should be cooked with tomato and onion and then scrambled with two or three eggs.

As far as baked goods, they have the kind of tasty and inexpensive breads and pastries that I've come to expect from Guatemalan bakeries in teh mold of Markello's and Delicias. The annatto-tinted white goo filled turnovers, the sugar topped white breads, the torpedo rolls at implausibly low prices. They have some other coffee-cake style breakfast rolls, some with elaborate designs cut into the top, and several kinds of cookie.

On the weekends they'll serve prepared foods: tamales, rellenitos, chiles rellenos, paches (the potato filled bananaleaf tamales), and other things as the mood strikes them.

If my first couple of purchases are any indication, the place is pretty good and a sound replacement for the bakery of the past, and I'm looking forward to trying their fines de semana prepared foods.

Guatelinda Bakery
on Diversey at Whipple
7 Days a week from 6AM (i think) to 8 PM

So Delicias Guatemalteco, aka La Luna del Xelaju, is completely gone?

I had one excellent meal there (chronicled here) and a subsequent try that was kind of a botch, I'm sorry now I never got back there but it sounds like a place that never got into its groove and was able to deliver a consistent meal.

As far as I know it's totally gone - it's been barred and the windows have been papered for at least a coupla months and there's no indication from the outside of any work going on inside.