single serving breakfast sandwich: corner bakery & cafe...for the tourist in you

Nov 19

Nov 19 single serving breakfast sandwich: corner bakery & cafe...for the tourist in you

A.W.

It's a return to breakfast! This time, I thought I'd go a little more populist and check out a place that is right downtown on Market Street and attracts the wave of tourists wandering the area trying to figure out which direction is SFMOMA and which direction is Chinatown. It's Corner Bakery & Cafe. Honestly, it has been open for awhile now and I've walked past innumerable times, always with the thought, oh it's for tourists in my mind.

I, for one, should know better than to discount places like that as sometimes they have well earned reps for a reason. But you know how we locals get, always gotta be hitting up the brand new or off the beaten track places only we know to try! In the interest of keeping an open mind and going somewhere I've not been before, I felt it was time to see what they got.

Inside, the space does have sort of a chain restaurant feel and it was bustling on this particular morning. At the counter where you order, they have a display case of baked goods--pastries, donuts, croissants, bagels, etc.--and they all looked good. The women at the register said they do bake everything fresh in-house too. Since I was here before work, I stayed on my mission to just get a breakfast sandwich and save my gluttonous desire for sweets till another day. I zeroed in on one item that stood out, the commuter croissant.

A flaky croissant with scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese, apple wood smoked bacon (isn't it all?) and tomatoes. Now that's different! I don't see many, if any, places that have that automatically on one of these. Some other good points about the sandwich, you get plenty of bacon AND egg, the croissant tastes buttery and tomatoes are fresh. Some things they could work on, croissant wasn't heated up and while the bacon and eggs were cooked, they were more room temp as if they'd been pre-made thus causing the cheese to not be melted at all. It was more a lukewarm sandwich instead of a hot and ready sandwich.

I think the trade off here might be it is a big in size breakfast sandwich that will only run you $5.95 and that is a bargain in SF. Thus, if you are a tourist on a budget, it can be totally worth it for quick bite before hitting all the sites. While I'm a fan of price and size, I might have been more of a fan had it been more hot, made to order instead of room temp slapped together.

To recap: if you are visiting SF and need a quick take away bite and don't want McDonald's, Corner Bakery & Cafe is decent alternative that isn't a budget buster. For the rest of us, there are plenty of good breakfast sandwiches in this town closer to where we live, thus we don't need to go in search of this one. Though, I probably will revisit this place to see how their pastries are. I mean, they had their version of a "pop-tart" and seriously, how can I pass that up?