Chocolate and strawberry cream-filled spiral croissants. (Photo courtesy Julia Brown)

By Kate Bradshaw

Marvel Cake, a Campbell bakery best known for its spiral croissants, has a new Palo Alto location currently expected to open in mid-March.

The bakery is a family business started by Maryam Menbari, according to her husband Reza Mirzadeh, who also works for the bakery along with their son. It began back in 2009 when Maryam was looking for a fondant cake for Reza's birthday but couldn't find one to purchase that she liked. So she made her own.

"It came out really well," Reza says. She continued to bake for friends and family, but it wasn't until 2019 that the family got serious about building the baking into a business.

They opened Marvel Cake in Campbell in early 2020, hosting the grand opening three weeks before the pandemic hit. The business survived, and in 2021 and 2022, it began to thrive.

"Word of mouth helped us a lot," he says.

Today, the bakery has around 18 employees, and the team is looking to add seven or eight more for the Palo Alto location.

"We make everything from scratch," Reza Mirzadeh says.

The bakery's signature pastry is the cream-filled spiral croissant, made popular on TikTok. Additional offerings include cupcakes and custom cakes, including wedding cakes, alongside tarts and other patisserie offerings.

After seeing the spiral croissant from New York City's Lafayette Bakery growing in popularity, the Mirzadeh family decided to try making their own. After some initial success, they invested in new machinery and ovens needed to produce the croissants. Nowadays, Reza says, the bakery often sells out of the spiral croissants within the first hour of opening, and customers have come from as far as Sacramento to pick them up. They have created a limit of three croissants per person and only one of each flavor (strawberry, chocolate and pistachio) to be able to serve more people.

The new Palo Alto location won't have a full kitchen; it'll operate mainly as a retail outpost with the bulk of the baking continuing to happen in Campbell, he says.

Marvel Cake, 250 University Ave., Suite 107, Palo Alto; 1614 W Campbell Ave., Campbell, 408-816-7046; Instagram: @marvel__cake.

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