The Sunday Traveler’s Rainbow Treasures

The eagerly awaited fortunes, hidden inside the cookies made it without being broken open on the train ride home. Anticipation is everything after a trek into San Francisco’s Chinatown, a hunt and successful search for the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. My future looks pretty good.

I had read about the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in a magazine a couple of years ago, and made a mental note of it for a future outing. The mental note got a bit fuzzy over the years and finding the factory required a few stops in local shops in Chinatown asking for its location. (Note to self: create a notebook to jot down ideas and places with addresses for future outings). The alley where the cookie factory is located, Ross Alley, is extremely more interesting than the  factory itself it turns out, but the next time I crack open a fortune cookie in a restaurant in the Bay Area,  I will know how it is made and probably where.

The factory is basically a large narrow room, and is a two cookie maker operation. I also discerned that a lot of eggs are used. The workers in the shop spoke little English, so getting details on the actual recipe, or process for the dough, was not possible.

 

The woman in the previous photo is sitting right behind this woman, and are the only two making the cookies. The cookie is taken off the disc in the right of this photo, fortune installed, and cookie bent and given its classic shape over the wire sticking out by the woman’s hands. Voila! I had to suppress a giggle as I thought of that I Love Lucy show of Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory eating what they couldn’t get off the conveyor belt fast enough.

I have no idea where the slips of papers with the fortunes came from, but I can almost visualize a man sitting in a back room with a typewriter thinking up fortunes and typing them out. Hope he doesn’t have any spells of writer’s block.

Chinese icon

January Calendar

bags of fortunes

adult fortunes