October 2013

This little place in the trendy/tourist part of the Mission neighborhood is one side of a restaurant-bakery collaboration. It was mobbed even on a Wednesday morning, for very good reason. It’s pretty San Francisco, everything  coarse and crunchy, inadequate salt (there was one shaker in the whole restaurant and one of the ladies had to dig around to find it) but refreshingly plenty of sugar.

The coffee was bitter like you get in Café Artigiano in Vancouver. A frangipane croissant was huge, crunchy, and chewy-soft in the center which was packed with heavy sweet almond paste. Then the croque monsieur for which there were four choices of predominant flavor — we chose the shiitake mushroom – and which needed salt was otherwise massive and flawless with tomato, cheese, and softening coarse Italian-style bread.

We left satisfied and with a little container of bread pudding which also turned out to be fabulous, heated up a little bit with some white sugar and heavy cream. Overall 8.3. The ambience is noisy and bustling, service nonexistent, food generally fabulous, value about at expectation.