Repostería Ricomini

The Ricomini bakery on Calle Méndez Vigo is the best-known producer of the local brazo gitano — long rolls of feather-light sponge wound around guava paste, dulce de leche, pineapple, coconut, or any of a dozen other fillings. Tourists buy them in fancy paper boxes to take home; locals buy them by the half-roll for breakfast.

The shop is plain, the queue is often out the door on Sunday mornings, and the cake is genuinely good. Worth a stop even if you have just had lunch.

eating out bakery
A story
Mayagüez claims to have invented the *brazo gitano* — literally "gypsy arm," a thin sponge cake rolled around fruit jam or guava paste — at a local Spanish-immigrant bakery in 1888. Several Mayagüez bakeries fight over the title; the version now exported island-wide is most associated with the descendants of those original bakers.

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