Yeh's Bakery Flushing: Chinese Bakery Famous for Boston Pie

Yeh's Bakery has been selling its Boston pie, a sugar-dusted sponge cake with vanilla custard and no chocolate glaze, from the same Flushing storefront since 1987. The shop is at 57-25 Main St, Flushing, NY 11355, south of downtown near 57th Avenue, and it opens every day from 7 am to 7 pm. It is cash only and has no seating at all. For anyone searching chinese bakery near me in eastern Queens before a birthday, this is the Taiwanese counter local families have trusted for decades.

Time Out describes Yeh's as Yi Shih Yeh's Taiwanese sweetshop, and Flushing.com, the neighborhood site, dates it to 1987 and calls it a cornerstone of the area's food scene. Its red leaf logo, which the site says stands for good fortune and prosperity, is how most locals recognize the shop. Flushing.com also calls it a cultural hub for Flushing's Taiwanese community, a place where the old flavors are handed down to a new generation of customers.

The Infatuation puts it more personally: Yeh's is a birthday staple for many Asian Americans who grew up in the neighborhood. Curbed, in its 2024 guide to the city's best cake shops, notes that the shop sits between a Chase bank and a T-Mobile store and is easy to walk past. Inside it is bare bones, just a couple of refrigerated cases holding egg tarts, red bean buns and Chinese and Taiwanese layer cakes decorated with kiwi slices.

The cake that built the reputation is listed in Chinese as 波士頓派, Boston pie. Time Out explains that it is not what you would expect from the American classic: there is no chocolate glaze, and the cake is closer to a large, sugar-dusted whoopie pie, with two flaky, delicate rounds of sponge sandwiching vanilla cream custard. Flushing.com says it can be bought by the slice or as a whole pie, and that it has been featured by Eater and Chowhound.

Dessert maker Mina Park told Curbed that the super-aerated, superlight sponge with whipped cream in the middle turned her into a regular. She described the whole Boston pies as huge, lumpy and kind of amorphous-looking, and praised a Black Forest cake for its light chocolate flavor. Her favorite, though, is a plain piece of sponge: mellow sweetness and a texture with no resistance when the fork goes through, one fluffy bite.

The cases hold more than the pie. Time Out singles out a sizable selection of roulades, especially the green tea roll, a swirl of crumbly cake and whipped vanilla cream subtly flavored with Japanese matcha powder. It also lists sponge cakes in vanilla, strawberry or green tea, or a rainbow of all three. Flushing.com adds mochi rolls in red bean, taro and peanut, and a light Taiwanese sponge cake with a subtle egg flavor for people who prefer something delicate.

The savory shelf is where longtime customers go first. Flushing.com describes curry pastry puffs and chicken pastry puffs, both in flaky pastry filled with finely chopped onion, while Time Out lists curry puffs, scallion buns, moon cakes and egg tarts. Buttery Taiwanese pineapple cakes, feng li su, sit alongside them. Around the Mid-Autumn Festival the moon cakes, filled with red bean, lotus seed or salted egg yolk, take over the counter as gift boxes for family visits.

The loyalty here runs long. One reviewer, Peter Zhao, wrote on Facebook that after moving out to the Long Island suburbs he came back for half a dozen curry beef pastries and chicken rolls, and that the first bite tasted just like the first time he ate them as a boy in the 1990s. Another longtime customer, Linda, named the Boston cream pie as her family's favorite and said she also likes the green tea and chestnut flavors.

Here is the honest warning. Do not plan to eat at Yeh's. There are no tables or chairs, and with only two display cases, the room is built for pointing, paying and leaving. If you want a chocolate-glazed Boston cream pie in the New England style, skip the signature too, because this is a different cake entirely. Come instead for the sponge itself, which is the point of every item in the case, and take the box somewhere you can sit down.

Yeh's takes cash only, so bring bills before you walk down Main Street; Wanderlog's summary of hundreds of Google reviews says the cash rule is the one complaint that keeps coming up, and that most reviewers think the cakes justify it. The doors open at 7 am, which suits a cake pickup on the way to work or an early start before a family lunch. Closing is 7 pm every day of the week, Sundays included, so an after-work stop for a whole Boston pie still fits a weekday dinner.

If the case you came for is empty, the closest dependable fallback is Fay Da Bakery on Kissena Boulevard, about a mile to the northeast. That branch of the Chinese bakery chain opens at 6:45 am and closes at 7:30 pm every day, with a wide range of buns, breads and made-to-order cakes. In downtown Flushing, Tai Pan Bakery on Main Street, near the 7 train, is the other old standby for pineapple buns and egg tarts.

Yeh's sits about 1.5 miles south of the Flushing-Main Street station, the last stop on the 7 train and a Long Island Rail Road stop on the Port Washington Branch. The quickest connection is the Q44 Select Bus Service heading south on Main Street, a ride of about eight minutes, and the Q20 also runs along Main Street. Look for the Chase bank and the T-Mobile store; the narrow bakery entrance is between them.

Walking the 1.5 miles from downtown takes around half an hour and passes the Queens Botanical Garden on the way, which makes the bakery an easy add-on to a Flushing food day. A good routine is to ride the bus down, buy the cakes, then walk back north through the garden with the box rather than standing at the stop with a pie in your arms.

The Infatuation suggests exactly that: stock up on flaky cookies and moon cakes at Yeh's before a picnic at the Queens Botanical Garden, a few blocks north on Main Street. The 39-acre garden began as part of the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows and moved to this site in 1963, ahead of the 1964 fair. Its rose, bee, herb and perennial gardens and an arboretum sit above the buried Kissena Creek.

From April through October the garden is open 8 am to 6 pm, Tuesday through Sunday, and from November through March it closes at 4:30 pm. Admission from April 1 to December 15 is $6 for adults, $4 for seniors and students and $2 for children ages 4 to 12, and it is free from December 16 to March 31. Note that it is closed on Mondays, so a Monday bakery run is better taken home.

Yeh's Bakery, 57-25 Main St, Flushing, NY 11355, on Main Street near 57th Avenue, between a Chase bank and a T-Mobile store. Open daily 7 am to 7 pm. Cash only, no seating, takeout from two display cases. Signature: Boston pie by the slice or whole, plus roulades, curry puffs and seasonal moon cakes. Transit: 7 train or LIRR to Flushing-Main Street, then the Q44 SBS south, about eight minutes.