A Review of The Sugar Bowl Bakery (Geary) in San Francisco, CA

As I was meandering down Geary one fine morning the Sugar Bowl Bakery sign caught my eye, and for the life of me I couldn't remember where I'd seen the name before for a good fifteen minutes ... finally, I recalled that they were the purveyors of the rather shiny donuts that could be found over at the San Francisco State University campus restaurants. I don't know if they bake and deliver mass quantities of donuts from this particular location, but they do have a full-service restaurant and cafe in addition to the pastries and sweet goodies.

The Sugar Bowl Bakery is attached to the Kaiser Permanente hospital, which is great in view of all those "Thrive" ads that Kaiser runs all over the city showing people chomping down on green beans and whatnot. Leafy greens are definitely hard to find here, but there's plenty in the way of donuts, scones, brownies, cake slices and muffins. The restaurant portion focuses on fried Chinese food and sandwiches. And of course you can get your triple grande mocha latte on as well.

The coffee is that low-end Peerless stuff, which definitely isn't good but is drinkable in a pinch, and I'm sure it keeps hundreds of health care workers alert and functional each day. The prices are also fairly low-end as well, at least for the city, at about 1.20 to 1.70 per cup.

The donuts and the pastries are generic, mass market, cheap-ingredient sweets. That's about the best I can say. They'll do the trick on the cheap if you have a craving, but that's about all the more to expect.

Lunch seems to be priced given the captive audience, with everything a buck or two higher than you'd like to see it for the generic quality. About the healthiest thing you can get is a basic salad, or an apple and banana to nosh on. There's also the usual varieties of bagels and toppings. Sandwiches are the usual range of plain deli style with low-end grocery store ingredients. I didn't try the Chinese offerings but they looked like the standard heat lamp fare.

So nothing on the menu here is great, and some of it is a bit overpriced, but the main advantage is simply the size and spaciousness. San Francisco eateries are almost always as a rule small, cramped and somewhat uncomfortable. This is one of the few relatively huge places to have coffee, with a lot of space and a lot of different tables with fairly comfortable seating. It also hasn't ever seemed to be anywhere near full, though I'd imagine the Kaiser lunch break rush comes close to it.