Photos by Billie Winter
In the small-batch panadería Pan de La Selva’s new location inside City Hall, a bevy of pan dulce treats—pillowy pastel conchas, chubby pig-shaped puerquitos, laminated pastries—beckon from a gleaming pastry case. The oasis is filled with squishy, terracotta-colored couches, cobalt-blue wallpaper, vibrant paintings, and plants donated by customers during the soft opening. Sunlight filters through the windows in a greenhouse-like alcove, and Latin music ranging from pop to punk to psychedelic rock plays in the background.
“I definitely want someone to come here and just be like, whoa, what is this place?!” owner and baker Mayra Sibrian says. During her first week of business, a visitor expressed joy at hearing Shakira being played in the shop.
Sibrian recently moved into the vacant space as part of an activation for Seattle Restored—a program run by the Seattle Office of Economic Development in collaboration with Seattle Good Business Network, which helps artists and small business owners take over empty storefronts. Pan de La Selva soft opened inside the location, formerly home to an Einstein Bros. Bagels, in August and will occupy it until December.
When Sibrian found out she was approved for the space, she only had two weeks to move in. “I knew that I wanted color and comfort to be the main thing,” she says. “Sometimes when I go into coffee shops or bakeries, I feel kind of cold. I lean toward maximalism, and I very much like the coziness of a cafe, so those were the feelings and vibes I was going for.”
Sibrian grew up in San Diego with a Mexican mother and Salvadoran father and attended culinary school after high school due to her love of food. “For me, it wasn’t even so much about the indulgence of it, even though that was part of it,” she says. “It was more so the creativity and fun of it and just creating something with your hands, sending it off to someone and seeing the reaction.” Initially, she pursued savory cooking, even though “a little voice” in the back of her head told her it wasn’t what she really wanted. She was “shy and timid” at the time and struggled with the rigorous, militaristic nature of her classes, but willed herself to graduate.
After culinary school, she took a job as a prep cook in a cafeteria. “I actually fucked up the bread. I overproofed it,” she says. “That chef yelled at me. She was like, I can’t believe someone with a bachelor’s degree in culinary [arts] would do this!” The negative experience was enough to put her off baking and cooking altogether for a while. Shortly before moving to Seattle, however, she ate a life-changingly good concha at a panadería, and something clicked. “A light bulb went off in my head. I was just like, damn, this is where it’s at,” she says. “It started the journey of me connecting to my roots. It just lit a flame inside me.”
Sibrian moved to Seattle and found a job at a bakery in Kent, which acquainted her with the ins and outs of managing a small business. In 2020, she started Pan de La Selva (formerly Selva Central Goods), baking pan dulce inspired by Mexican and Central American traditions out of her apartment and delivering them to customers’ homes. From there, she began to sell her pastries at pop-ups and farmers markets across the city.
The name Pan de La Selva means “bread of the jungle” and is a reference to the rainforest landscapes of Mexico and Central America, as well as the lush abundance of the Pacific Northwest. Sibrian maintains a close relationship with the farmers markets as a longtime vendor and employs local ingredients, including flours from Cairnspring Mills and Shepherd’s Grain, fruit from Collins Family Orchards and Hayton Farms, and corn nixtamalized by Milpa Masa. “I still incorporate local ingredients to tie my product to this land,” she says. “Even though it’s not a selva, it’s still the traditional way of using what the land has to offer.”
She chooses her flavor profiles by a “process of elimination,” thinking about ingredients traditionally used in Latin America, then pairing them with whatever is locally available and in season and considering the taste, texture, and visuals. This results in combinations like passion fruit with blackberries, or apricot with papaya. “One customer was telling me how they really like my flavors because their kid, who is of Salvadoran descent, hasn’t grown up with Salvadoran pastries,” she says. “Their kid can see themself reflected in the baked good, because even though they’re a descendant of Latin American culture, they grew up here. It’s kind of a blend, wrapped up in one pastry, tying you to your family’s culture and the culture you grew up a part of.”
Though her mix of Latin American and Pacific Northwest flavors resonates with many fans, Sibrian has occasionally encountered resistance from within her own community due to her modern take on pan dulce. “There was a little bit of a pushback, because people wanted to hold on to tradition and roots, which I totally get. But at the same time, we’re allowed to be creative. We’re allowed to be inventive,” she says. “If you don’t like my pan or where I’m taking it, then yeah, go and support the mom-and-pop shop [with] traditional conchas! They’re there, but there are also different ways of exploring our connection and [the] culture that comes with food.”
Currently, she’s offering a chocolate oreja (a palmier-shaped pastry) made with yaupon from Georgetown-based Diaspora Cafe, who sources the ingredient from an Indigenous woman in Texas. Yaupon, which lends a subtly earthy taste to the flaky pastry, is a species of holly that has historically been brewed as tea by Indigenous people for ceremonial purposes and is the only caffeinated plant native to North America.
She also serves a breakfast sandwich with refried beans, a baked egg patty, avocado crema, fried plantains, and salsa macha on a house-made bolillo, inspired by her nostalgia for the simplicity of a classic Salvadoran breakfast with eggs, refried beans, plantains, and avocado. “I’ve said that would probably be my last meal, a Central American breakfast,” she says.
While she hopes to make her baked goods accessible to everyone, Sibrian says she prioritizes “catering to the Latinx diaspora” above all else. Her space showcases handmade wares from Latinx vendors for sale and art from Latinx artists, including a stunning piece called The Portal by artist and muralist Esmeralda Vasquez. The painting shows a hand reaching through a threshold, making contact with another hand, and represents curiosity and the search for a sense of belonging and identity in one’s own culture as a second-generation immigrant—“a portal into that place of wonder,” Vasquez says.
Sibrian was wary, at first, to move into City Hall, given her politics and the city’s relationship with ICE, but says that things have gone smoothly so far and that she has received a warm reception. “It was the opportunity that Seattle Restored had, so I was like, okay, let’s try it,” she says. “I feel like I’m still able to be myself. I don’t take being in this space lightly.” She recently met Mayor Bruce Harrell as part of the Seattle Restored program and intentionally wore a “Chinga La Migra” T-shirt for the occasion.
“I think I just want to make this space more inviting, because it can be intimidating to come into a government building,” she says. “The way I view it is, I just happen to be at City Hall. I’m not City Hall, and I still want
to express myself and my views.”
Pan de La Selva is only a team of three, including Sibrian, so the effort of running the business takes up most of her time and energy, and it can be a challenge to nourish her creative side and stay true to her original vision. She’s taking things day by day, but someday, she’d like to offer an educational component where chefs of different backgrounds could teach workshops and help feed the community. “I think having a kitchen or a hub where we could share that knowledge would be really cool,” she says.
The most fulfilling part of Sibrian’s work is the accomplishment she feels when she finally nails a tough recipe. Often, her favorite things to bake are the recipes she wasn’t happy with at first, such as the chocolate oreja and the panela cardamom buns she made at the request of Day Made Kaffe Bar owner Ash Day. “It is rewarding when something just comes together correctly, how I envisioned it in my head, and how I want it to taste and feel,” she says. “There are all these little factors that you have to pay attention to, [so] when they land, it’s like, fuck yeah! It’s just satisfying.”
At the end of the day, Sibrian wants her baked goods to evoke “emotion, curiosity, and connection” in the person eating them, reawakening memories and sparking reflection.
“I’m just trying to make you feel something,” she says. “That’s what it comes down to.”
