Inside barrels of fortune cookies sit on the floor, racks of vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and green tea bagged cookies line the walls, boxes of chocolate covered fortune cookies sit on a table, and a crowd surrounds the one friendly man processing purchases.Īfter being handed some samples, we squeezed through the crowd into the factory area to see the cookies being hand-stuffed and hand-folded up close. It’s not much bigger than our kitchen and family room and it’s very hot inside, but who really cares when you get free samples of the best fortune cookies you have ever tasted hot off the cookie presses! When we arrived, we walked right in and discovered just how small this “factory” is. The folded handmade fortune cookies and flat missed-fortune wafer cookies production is about 25,000 pieces every day, which is pretty amazing when you see how they’re actually stuffed and folded by hand! The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory has been supplying fortune cookies to Chinatown and shipping them around the world since 1962.

The delicious aroma of fresh baked fortune cookies greets you at the street and guides you to the entrance of the tiny Chinatown bakery. The fortunate cookie factory is tucked off the main streets in an alley and thankfully, you can smell it before you find it. We weren’t quite sure where it was located, so we wandered around Chinatown for a while, making pressed pennies, peeking in little shops, and enjoying the bright colors and beautiful lanterns overhead. Recently my son Carter has developed quite the taste for fortune cookies, so I told him about the mysterious fortune cookie factory in San Francisco, and we made plans to go on our Mother’s Day weekend getaway.Īfter climbing the Filbert Steps and the Greenwich Steps and touring Coit Tower, we walked a little over a mile to Chinatown in search for the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. My parents’ best friends at the time went to San Francisco often to visit family and they would always bring us back a fresh bag of cookies from the fortunate cookie factory. I have fond memories of eating delicious flat fortune cookies that tasted way better than the cardboard-like cookies they pass out at Chinese restaurants.

Fortune cookie restaurant