Prantl’s Bakery — Restaurant in Bellevue

GARBAGE - and that is where that cake ended-up. Lincoln Bakery used to produce really great cakes and was our family's go to for birthdays, anniversaries, first communion, baptisms, and various other celebrations - Well not anymore!!!

This was simply the most awful cake that we have ever had the misfortune to purchase. It was inedible, and to be honest, it was disgusting.

My husband picked-up the cake and it was already in a box, tied-up, without any opportunity to see it before paying for it. After being carefully transported home, we opened the box and a section of roses had slid off of the top of the cake. I wasn't happy, but since the cake was already boxed and tied-up, who could say when the icing was disturbed.

The cake itself was not fresh, and the chocolate bottom layer was actually stale and markedly thinner than the top vanilla layer. The worst part, and what made the cake inedible, was the icing!!! It had a strange consistency, almost like shaving cream, and an overpowering artificial flavor that left an unpleasant, oil-like coating on the inside of your mouth with a bitter artificial aftertaste I don't have the words to describe how disgusting this excuse for a cake actually was. No one managed more than 2 bites, not even the children. We and our guests were all seated around the table, each of us began eating our piece of cake, and after a moment everyone just stopped eating, we all just sort of looked at each other, some with apparent distaste on their faces. Then one of the children asked their mother if they could "spit it out" and have a drink because the cake tasted bad! I truly cannot convey how terrible this cake was!!!!

This cake ruined our birthday party and left us embarrassed and apologizing to our guests for serving something so nasty.

Except for the few bites everyone had before they stopped eating, the entire cake ended up in the garbage; frankly that is where it belonged. What a waste of food and money.

We made a special trip from Beaver County to buy this cake and to say we could have made a better cake if we had bought a box of cake mix and a tub of pre-made frosting at the grocery store, would not be an exaggeration.

If you have an upcoming celebration, do yourself and your guests a favor and order your cake...

As a disclaimer, I don’t really ever leave a negative review. Back in July 2022, we did a cake tasting and placed an order for a wedding cake for Sept 2023. Unfortunately, we had to move the date of the wedding because of venue issues to July 2024. I called into Lincoln to make the changes, they said no problem and moved my deposit to the new date. I called at the end of April 2024 (4/30/24) to make sure everything was still ok, and sent my new cake inspiration photos to their email account. They let me know they would call two weeks ahead for payment, which would have been Saturday 6/29/24. They didn’t call, so I added them to my list of phone calls for this week. We come to find out that they decided to close shop for a vacation the week of our wedding (something that apparently was planned some time between 4/30/24 and now), and had been trying to call us but they had the wrong number. Now, we are 10 days out, without a cake. The menus were even printed with the specific kind of cake we were having. When I called to talk to them about it, I was more sad than anything, but the woman on the phone was incredibly rude, and told me with a huge attitude that they did everything in their power to reach me. I’m sorry - if you’re CANCELLING a wedding at the eleventh hour, you need to give more effort than dialing the same wrong number over and over again. That is genuinely a bare minimum effort. Especially when you have an email in your inbox from me in the last two months, it’s a very simple task and would have taken less than 3 minutes to search my name, and send an email to me letting me know that I need to call the store. They were completely unapologetic and incredibly unkind. I’ve loved Lincoln’s products for a long time, but after this, I will never set foot in their store again. I would think twice before ordering for any important event from here… there are an abundance of great bakeries in Pittsburgh and I would choose any one of them before I would...

They say that all good things must come to an end, and at no place is that more true than Lincoln Bakery — which, in all but name, is a dead man walking. When ownership first changed hands a while ago, the available offerings shrunk, and some prices rose slightly, but it was still the Lincoln Bakery we all knew and loved. Special, in-house recipes, some of the best donuts anywhere in the city, great cakes and pies, and always had something worth coming out for, even from a distance.

These days, it is little more than another corporatized Prantl’s location, which itself is a name that has fallen off massively as they left their original downtown location in favor of endless expansion and profit chasing over quality. Frankly, it’s a little offensive to use Lincoln Bakery’s namesake in this way, and I hope they change the name on the exterior soon to match what it actually is so unsuspecting customers will be fooled no longer by the promises of a bakery long gone, its recipes and quality lost forever to the shell of a bakery it now has fallen to.

There is one thing to look forward to, though - there is now a VERY big hole in the Bellevue/surrounding boros bakery scene, which we all hope will be filled soon by someone who actually cares about the art of baking and their community the way that Lincoln once did.

Rest in Peace to a once legendary...