Golden Gate Bakery

Cuisine Chinese, Café / Bakery
Price $ (under 15)
Rating 6/10
Last Visit Jan. 11, 2025
Location SFBA: San Francisco: Downtown + SoMa

General Notes

Golden Gate Bakery is a bit of an institution in SF's Chinatown. They're well known as having the best egg tarts in the city. Not surprisingly, they are VERY popular. They're also infamous for being really hard to actually buy egg tarts from. The bakery is run by an old married couple who is basically retired and just baking egg tarts for fun, so they open and close at arbitrary times, often closing for long periods of time. Their hours are so irregular that there's even a separate Facebook page specifically for whether they're open. Then there's also waiting in the line (which takes a while, they make the egg tarts incrementally along the way, so they're still warm when you get them!), and hoping that they still have egg tarts by the time you get to them (one time, I visited and was told they only had moon cakes, it was around mid-autumn festival). The egg tarts are excellent; the pastry is fantastic and the filling is cooked beautifully. But it definitely veers more towards the "eggy" and lighter (less creamy) consistency, which isn't my favorite -- personally I would choose Holy Nata over Golden Gate Bakery any day.