Joe’s Bakery & Coffee Shop is a family-owned East Side staple that’s been around since 1962. If you’ve never been there or it’s been a while, you should plan a visit now. Now that you have, great. More about Joe’s: This is a breakfast and lunch spot, basically a Tex-Mex/Mexican restaurant with a counter and booths and a jukebox playing Tejano jams in the background. It has dishes like pancakes, huevos ranchero, crispy tacos and enchiladas. The breakfast is phenomenal and they serve it all day — so there’s often a wait on weekends, when the place is packed with East Side regulars, UT kids, construction workers, city workers and families after church on Sundays.
People look forward to breakfast tacos made with fluffy homemade flour tortillas, especially migas taco con todo, which adds pico de gallo to their perfect migas tacos. The super crispy bacon at Joe’s defies the laws of pork belly physics – order it as a side or add it to a breakfast taco, where it will hang on top as if the tortilla were an too-small hammock. And don’t miss the carne guisada. Here it is made from pork, with meat so tender it rivals anything cooked in a fancy French restaurant. Joe’s is also a bakery with a huge variety of pan dulce – be sure to order the pink cake and conchas when you leave.
Food Summary
photo source: Richard Casteel
Oil and gas
As The Legend of Zelda or a 1964 Pontiac GTO muscle car, the Migas at Joe’s are classic, legendary and genre-defining. There may be many imitators, but few come close to achieving the near-perfect combination of soft scrambled eggs and slightly crispy tortillas, all topped with cheese.
photo source: Richard Casteel
Tacos for breakfast
Breakfast tacos at Joe’s feature fluffy, lightly grilled house-made flour tortillas. While you can just get a plate of migas (which comes with tortillas so you can make your own mini-tacos), you can order a lot of different things when ordering breakfast tacos. Our standard order is the taco migas, the bacon, egg and cheese taco, and the carne guisada taco.
photo source: Richard Casteel
Bacon
The crispy bacon at Joe’s is the pinnacle of bacon you’ll ever get. It’s breaded in flour, chilled overnight and cooked in a pan, so the bacon slices are flat, hold their shape and are cooked more evenly than the standard curly bacon you find at many places. You should order a side to share.
photo source: Richard Casteel
Sweet bread
It’s called Joe’s Bakery & Coffee Shop for a reason, because part of the operation is actually a bakery. You can tell by the large glass cases of dulce at the entrance. Joe’s is probably best known for its pink cake. You can order it as a snack while you wait for a table, or eat it on the way out.
