Leonard's Bakery is a Portuguese bakery in Honolulu, Hawaii, known for popularizing the malasada. The fried pastry, slightly crispier and chewier than a doughnut and with no hole, is known as a cuisine of Hawaii. Though Portuguese immigrants brought the malasada to Hawaii at the turn of the 20th century, Leonard's opened in 1952 and brought it to a wider audience. Leonard's is a household name in Hawaii and is well known in the continental United States and internationally. A franchise location opened in Japan in 2008.
Background and history
Margaret and Frank Leonard Rego Sr. opened Leonard's Bakery in 1952. Rego's mother had encouraged him to sell malasadas, a holeless Portuguese doughnut with a "crispier" outside and a "chewier" inside. Portuguese plantation workers brought the dessert to the Hawaiian Islands when they immigrated at the turn of the 20th century. Leonard's is known as an "old-fashioned, plain-Jane bakery" that popularized pastries and desserts in Portuguese cuisine, like Portuguese sweet bread and pão doce meat wraps, sometimes with a Hawaiian cultural borrowing like haupia, coconut, and guava filled malasadas.[1]
As of 2011, the bakery remains a family business owned by Leonard Rego Jr. whose own children participate in its operation just as he once did.