By Summer Sewell
Goody Goodie Cream and Sugar began as a tiny walk-up window in an alley on Folsom and 8th Street in SOMA. Now it’s all official with a big bakery and café on Harrison Street, and a namesake chocolate chip cookie that’s the opposite of a one trick pony.
Pastry chef Remi Hayashi and design mastermind Mary Moran met at USF “a bajillion years ago,” by Remi’s math. She says they jive on not caring too much about the accolades their cafe receives. For instance, Remi doesn’t remember what year SF Weekly awarded the Goody Goodie best chocolate chip cookie (it was 2010), and it just kinda slipped her mind that their perfectly bready Liege waffle won best waffle last year. “We just do what we want. You can’t get caught up in what everyone else is doing, or else you’ll end up just making cupcakes,” she says.
Forget cupcakes. They make four types of cookies with chocolate in them, and they’re all popular. But the Goody Goodie’s a distinctive heavyweight with an E. Guittard chocolate to dough ratio of 4:1. Remi jokes, “There’s dough in it because something needs to hold the chocolate together.”
The namesake cookie contains chips made from 61% cacao semi-sweet chocolate, 72% cacao bittersweet chocolate, along with milk chocolate chips and cacao nibs, so that you’re definitely getting some kind of chocolate in each bite. The gamut of soft milk chocolate to crisp nibs gives the Goody Goodie range in both flavor and texture. The cacao nibs are my favorite element, giving the cookie its addictive crunch.
In my two recent visits to the café, I’ve eaten five Goody Goodies. I always break them apart, to look at the layers of chocolate up close, and in the hopes of saving half for later. But between the walk and bus ride home, the cookie never survives. I apologize for any chocolate-spotted handles you may have encountered on the 49.
The Goody Goodie costs $2.90 and Remi says people sometimes sweat her about the price, which is crazy to me. For a cookie this dense with this much top-quality chocolate, in this city? Just put it in your mouth, and shut it. The Goody Goodie is worthwhile goodness — not something to munch riding your bike with one hand. Take a seat, marvel, smile.
Goody Goodie Cream and Sugar Café is around the corner from Rainbow Grocery, down the street from Dear Mom on Harrison Street. They’re open Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m.-4 p.m.
Photos by Summer Sewell
