For Monica Recio, the owner of the petite (but with punch) LaMon Bakehouse on Broadway near Temple Avenue, baking began long before she ever stepped into a professional kitchen.
LaMon isn’t just a bakery; it’s a culmination of a lifetime spent baking in the humid kitchens of the Philippines. Of working grueling hours in L.A.’s back kitchens while undocumented. Of the quiet sacrifices immigrant families make when they hand-mix dough in crumbling brick ovens and still have enough heart left over to take something on as their own.
“I want to tell people who say I don’t belong here or that I ‘didn’t do it the right way,'” Monica laments. “I want to tell them: ‘Let me show you how much I actually care for my community. The one here. Our community.'”
LaMon isn’t about flexing technique—though Monica’s got plenty. It’s about nostalgia. Warmth. A lack of pretense. The result? One of the city’s best desserts: an ube cheesecake that uses a crème brûlée topping as its send-off. Witty French riffs on classic Filipino sans rival—where a heavy cashew classic is reinterpreted with pistachio and raspberry.
Like many immigrant stories, LaMon Bakehouse’s begins humbly—though few can say it was within the rubble of cathedral ruins.
Monica’s family owned a small panadería in Batangas, a province in the southern Philippines referred to lovingly as the “Texas of the Philippines” by those who have traveled or moved Stateside. They had no mixers, no machines. The oven—built from the rubble of a 400-year-old cathedral—baked every batch of bread by hand-fired heat.
“Everything was by hand,” Monica said. “You’d be mixing two sacks of dough with nothing but your arms.”
And like so many first-generation kids who try to carry the weight of tradition, Monica’s parents didn’t want her to follow in their footsteps. They knew how exhausting it was. But she fell in love with the art of the pastry anyway.
Determined to find success doesn’t always equate to success…
Fast forward to her move to the States, where she worked 18- to 20-hour shifts in kitchens across Los Angeles, including at La Tropézienne—known for having some of the region’s best croissants but was a silent nightmare for undocumented workers before it shuttered. Withheld pay. An ICE agent appearance—not for the workers but the head honcho at the time.
“It was truly life-altering,” Monica said. “All you’ve done is work. All you’ve done is contribute. And to watch it all be taken away instantly made me understand the situation I was in.”
As precarious as the ground she stood on was, Monica finally gained documentation in 2020. That same year, she launched her pop-up dessert business while continuing to work full-time in commercial kitchens. She rented a tiny 100-square-foot space in DTLA—for a staggering $4,000 per month, no less. She’d bake through the night, then head to farmers markets to sell cookies, ube cheesecakes, and cream pies.
“At one point, we were living in North Long Beach, and I’d wake up at 4 a.m. every day just refreshing Loopnet,” she says. “That’s when I found our spot.”
The birth of LaMon Bakehouse
The tiny storefront on Broadway felt like fate: affordable, already equipped with some food infrastructure, and—miraculously—the landlord had been buying her lemon meringue pie for years at the Marine Stadium farmers market. “He recognized our packaging. That’s why he gave us a chance,” she said, laughing.
But nothing’s ever that easy. Not in food. Not in Long Beach. Shortly after moving in, she found herself caught in the middle of neighborhood drama with a nearby coffee shop owner. Then came the real blow: the space wasn’t permitted for food. “The health department told me it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fix everything—HVAC, plumbing, a new hood,” Monica said. “We had $16,000 to our name.”
So she pivoted. Instead of baking on-site, Monica continued to work out of a shared commercial kitchen nearby and used the South Street space as a pick-up and community hub. “We didn’t want to give it up. Our neighbors have been so good to us. They come in every week.”
LaMon’s banana cream pie, in fact, won the top prize at last year’s O.C. Fair. And it is unlike any other pie: Deeply spice-centric, this pie harbors the more earthy aspect of bananas while still giving everything you want from such a pie. Innovative, distinctly different, awesomely satisfying. Now she’s experimenting and dreaming about building a more permanent home—something with a full kitchen. But even as she dreams bigger, Monica is deliberate in her approach.
“People ask why I don’t do the fine-dining thing, or why I don’t lean into the ‘bougie’ side of pastry,” she says. “But I’d rather have someone come here every week for something small and sweet than save up to buy one big cake a year.
“This space is me,” she says. “Colorful. A little chaotic. Full of heart.”
Can we get an amen?
LaMon Bakehouse is located at 2742 E. Broadway.
