Inside Alon’s Bakery & Market
Alon’s Bakery & Market has anchored Virginia-Highland since 1992, a European-style bakery known for made-from-scratch breads, handmade pastries, European cakes, and gourmet sandwiches. We came at 4:30 in the morning, hours before the doors open, to watch founder and executive chef Alon Balshan make the day’s first pastries.
“I remember the very first day we opened this bakery. Three women came in three times that day, and what they said to me was: this feels like Europe. And I thought, I nailed it.”
Alon Balshan, Founder and Executive Chef
Chef Balshan, an Israeli native, trained at Tadmor Culinary School and worked his way through European bakeries and hotels before arriving in the United States with $500 and a backpack. He opened the first Alon’s, a 1,300 square foot shop in Virginia-Highland, with help from his father Maurice. These days the early mornings belong to the team he trained, but the standard is still his, set the day he opened.
For our shoot, Alon came back to the bench himself. His hands move with the precision that comes from thirty years of repetition, folding and shaping without a wasted motion. There is nothing rushed about it, and nothing showy. He is calm in a way that sets the rhythm for everyone around him.
That care shows up in the product. Everything at Alon’s is made from scratch: European-style breads and cakes, handmade pastries, gourmet sandwiches, prepared foods, fine cheeses, and chocolates. The original Virginia-Highland location grew into a full European-style market in 2004, and a second location opened at Phipps Plaza in 2021. The bakery has been covered by Eater Atlanta, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta Magazine, and Southern Living.
Then at 7 a.m., the doors opened. The quiet kitchen gave way to the morning rush, regulars and newcomers filing in for the pastries, breads, and coffee that had just come together in front of us. The line moved, the cases filled and emptied, and the room took on the easy energy of a place people have trusted for a generation.
Most of Alon’s customers come from Virginia-Highland, Morningside, and the surrounding Atlanta neighborhoods, with a second home at Phipps Plaza in Buckhead. If you have been meaning to find your go-to bakery in Atlanta, somewhere that still does it by hand the way it has since 1992, start here.
