After chowing down at I Luv Pho last week, Adam, Mary and I headed down to Pan Chapin for some dessert. Pan Chapin is located right above Quickly in the same two-story building that houses Tempo Doeloe and Bei Jing Kabobs.

We popped in and immediately felt out of place in the tight interior. Feeling out of place on Buford Highway isn’t uncommon, and getting through experiences like that is half the reason we do this, so no biggie. However, not only was the format and atmosphere a little off-putting (like a combination gas-station shop, bakery, and small taqueria), but there were no labels on the food, and the help behind the counter elected to not offer any assistance. Were I a bit more bold and comfortable with my spanish skills, I might have simply asked for help, but I did not.

Without said labels or help, we eyed the case closely to select the three items we felt were most likely to be sweet, as some of the bread certainly seemed to be plain or savory. For future reference I will give each item a self-explanatory nickname: The calzone, the cog, and the nipple-bread. I never said that I was the height of sophistication, y’all.

The calzone was selected because they were powdery and jelly could been spotted leaking out of some of them. The cog was selected because it resembled a snickerdoodle cookie. The nipple-bread was selected because it was hoped the shape was due to their being some sort of jelly or custard inside.

The calzone became true to its nickname and tasted an awful lot like pizza bread – a little dry and not sweet at all – and indeed the powdery stuff on the exterior was flour rather than something sugary. There was hardly any jelly in it whatsoever – what little it may have begun with seemed to have mostly cooked off while baking.

The cog did taste like a dense, subtle snickerdoodle cookie. It was dry but went great with some milk. Having been disappointed by the gap between the calzone’s appearance and its reality, I set the rest of my cog aside so sample the nipple-bread, in case the cog was the best of the bunch.

And indeed the nipple-bread was merely bread, with nothing inside it at all. It was only ever so slightly sweet. I gratefully returned to the relative sweetness of my piece of the cog.

It must be obvious by now that I was not impressed with Pan Chapin. Certainly some of this confusing and lackluster experience was our fault for being hapless gringos. But labels and prices seem like a completely reasonable expectation to me, and a smile or helpful suggestion from behind the counter would have been very much appreciated. Alas, I don’t even know how much this bread cost me, as we hurriedly paid in cash and decamped to the house to eat the bread a little later.

Regardless of our hand in the matter, my mind returns to La Sultana Bakery, a similarly no-frills and little-to-no english affair, where the we were assisted with out selection in the best way that could be managed and left perfectly contented with the experience and the purchases. With that in mind, I feel that I must award Pan Chapin 2 stars. We’ll be sure to try again during our inevitable second sweep of Buford Highway.

Pan Chapin
5090 Buford Highway
Atlanta, GA 30340