Villa Nueva Bakery

While Orange Avenue fills with brunch crowds paying $18 for avocado toast, Villa Nueva runs on a different clock: the one where you grab a Milanesa torta after dog beach, where the counter ladies know your order, where nothing costs more than it should. It's the kind of place that reminds transplants what old Coronado felt like before every storefront turned into a boutique.

The bakery side anchors the morning — conchas and cookies that regulars grab on autopilot — but the real draw is the full kitchen turning out proper Mexican plates alongside American diner standards. The turkey club shows up in reviews like clockwork (massive, loaded with avocado, the platonic ideal of the form), but the tortas are where the kitchen flexes. The Milanesa comes breaded, fried, stacked tall, the kind of sandwich that requires strategic architecture to eat.

Breakfast runs both directions: French toast for the ferry landing tourists, chilaquiles for the navy families who've been coming here for years. Everything arrives hot, made to order, which explains the wait but also why people keep coming back. You order at the counter, grab a number, seat yourself inside or on the patio — it's casual in the way that actually means casual, not the way restaurants use it to charge $40 for meatballs.

The outdoor seating catches the post-beach crowd: dogs welcome, salt-sticky kids demolishing breakfast burritos, the occasional sailor in uniform grabbing lunch. It's not polished, not Instagram-optimized, not trying to be anything except the neighborhood bakery-cafe that feeds people honest food at honest prices. In a town where the zip code alone inflates the bill, that's rarer than you'd think.