Eating At Lulla’s Venezuelan Bakery: Unique and Familiar all at Once
By Ian MacAllen on Sunday, June 1st, 2025 at 11:06 pm
Lulla’s Venezuelan Bakery opened in January of this year, the latest destination restaurant to open in East Williamsburg. The restaurant opens daily with pastries and coffee and has an all day brunch menu, all drawing inspiration from Venezuelan cuisine.
Branded as the first Venezuelan bakery in New York City, Lulla’s is the little sister of adjacent Casa Ora, a Venezuelan restaurant that has been attracting quite a lot of attention for the last several years. My wife and I ate at Casa Ora when it first opened at the end of November in 2019–that was before we had a baby, before the pandemic, and before it appeared in the Michelin Guide. It was not, in my mind, exceptionally memorable, but we ate there in the opening days when the restaurant was still getting their footing.
In the COVIDy summer that followed, Casa Ora erected a fancy outdoor dining shed that filled with diners nightly. The restaurant became a popular destination, even as others struggled through the pandemic.
In Lulla’s, we get a more casual, accessible menu and a combination of a neighborhood cafe and destination worth visiting from across the city.
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There’s a crowded restaurant scene in East Williamsburg these days. The Montrose Avenue stop off the L was best known for a handful of dive bars until Win Son opened in 2016. It’s wild to think that was nearly a decade ago now, but at the time, the restaurant helped usher in an era of modern Taiwanese restaurants. Win Son wasn’t an instant hit, but gradually began to attract crowds. Eventually, waiting for a table became an untenable on weekends.
The success led to a second venture in a retail space catty-corner to the original. Win Son Bakery, which opened in 2019, was more of a viral sensation than the restaurant. The casual, counter-service restaurant sold sandwiches, creative donuts, and lighter items like the Caesar salad. It continues to attract lines, longer even, than when it first opened. An outpost of the bakery has since opened in the East Village earlier this year.
Having lived in the neighborhood for more than a dozen years, it was strange watching the otherwise marginalized space suddenly attract Uber crowds. There’s more places to choose from now, like Baby Blues Luncheonette, but every place is excessively crowded. But 2019 was a big turning point for the area. Casa Ora opened late in the year, joining the growing number of fine dining restaurants.
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Lulla’s Bakery shares the block of Graham Avenue with Win Son, just five storefronts between them. Lulla’s has more frontage though, and wraps around the corner of Meserole Street with sidewalk cafe tables. It’s a huge space on the ground floor of a newish apartment building, and the big plate glass windows fill Lulla’s with daylight.
The team spent months building out the space, a testament to the comically serpentine bureaucracy of New York City and the care that went into building the interior. We first took note of the construction in January of 2024, a year before the restaurant actually opened. There’s custom woodwork everywhere, fancy lighting fixtures, and beautiful bathrooms.
Both Casa Ora and Lulla’s are owned by the Diaz family, consisting of Isbelis Diaz, her son, Ivo Diaz, and Ivo’s wife, Rachel Diaz Pirard. Cosa Ora sous chef Diego Farias will be joining the family in managing Lulla’s, making it helpful that Casa Ora is just next door.
The first great thing about Lulla’s is that it opens weekday mornings at 7am to sell pastries, coffee, and a brunch menu. I stopped in a few weeks back after dropping our kid off at daycare and ended up with a tasty cinnamon bun and filled croissant. There are a number of places in the neighborhood selling croissants, but so far Lulla’s is the best by far.
It’s a spectacular addition to the neighborhood, and since the dining room is open in the morning, it’s likely to become a destination for the daytime crowd. My wife spent a slow morning working from a table there. It’s not yet crowded, but those who know, know. The big space can likely accommodate plenty of people, and there was Wi-Fi.
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Sunday afternoon, my in-laws took our kid to the park and we decided to have brunch. The windy afternoon was probably fine for eating at the cafe tables, and there were plenty of people eating there, but we opted for one inside. The interior is lush and modern. There’s light wood, bright colors, and potted plants. We’re so far away from the industrial chic, the old bricks and industrial pipe furniture popular throughout Brooklyn in the first two decades of the century, that Lulla’s feels like the future. It’s an aesthetic that places like Carthage Must Be Destroyed pioneered, though Lulla’s is decidedly less pink.
We ordered coffee while looking over the menu. I thought about a cocktail, but opted out. Lulla’s has a $24 cocktail, which is outrageous anywhere, let alone a block of East Williamsburg sandwiched between housing projects. No wonder Gen Z isn’t drinking much these days. The rest of the cocktails on the menu were in the $16 to $18 range, which is still a difficult pill to swallow for Brooklyn. I’m sure they’re great, but I stuck with tap water and black coffee.
We started with the corn donuts, Mandocas. My wife had spotted these at a nearby table the morning she was working here, and insisted we give them a try. They were delightful, just lightly sweet. But where they really stood out was combined with the nata cream and queso blanco, creating a sweet and salty flavor profile.
My wife went with the arepas Venzeolanas, a mix and match of any two arepas. They come either grilled or fried, and she chose grilled. I was impressed with their size, stuffed with filling. She went with chicken avocado salad and eggs and sofrito. She thought the chicken salad was great, but that they were trying too hard with the egg filling to appease a certain kind of American consumer.
I ordered the rancheros. The eggs were poached perfectly, the creamy yolk spilling onto the rest of the dish. The arepa underneath was soft and substantial, absorbing the spicy red sauce. There were plenty of black beans too, and each bit was delightful in a different kind of way.
The fried plantains were a fine addition, and good for dipping in the ranchero sauce. The chimichurri served with them wasn’t quite as flavorful as the green and orange hot sauce. Overall, they added texture, crunchy, to the meal.
Lulla’s menu reflects a pragmatic approach to Brooklyn brunch–it’s unique, but familiar at the same time. It’s the kind of place that I could return to regularly and still feel like I’m experiencing something fresh, while satisfying a broad range of tastes.
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