Gastronomique: More Beard Awards
The only way we can make sense of the Beard Papa name is to translate it in French: barbe à papa, ie. cotton candy. As in: a sweet indulgence. And it does smell a bit like cotton candy when you step in the store front at the corner of Mission and Yerba Buena lane, across from the Yerba Buena garden. This is the first store of this cream puffs chain in San Francisco, with more to come in the area. The cloying smell took us back to the good old times when the Hostess factory was wafting its saccharine-loaded winds towards Division St, and you'd get a sugar high just from walking by.
Beard Papa does not serve twinkies, but their cream puffs are driving San Franciscans to insanity all the same. Oh, no one with vanilla cream on their lips has lunged at Chris Daly yet. But how else would you explain the lines outside of the store which stretched 90 minutes on opening day? 90 minutes for a pate à choux sphere filled with a runny vanilla custard? Even we were impatiently wating. The puffs are good, granted, not overly sweet as the scent had us fear and speckled with real vanilla beans inside, but not that good.
[Ed. note: Hit the jump, and check out SFist Ced's video footage of the Beard Papa assembly process! So exciting!]
Luckily for us, the wait was only down to five minutes when we stopped there yesterday. Still, it's five minutes more than our visit to the Upper West Side outlet. Nevertheless, our choice was made quickly: just like you could pick any color for your model T if it was black, you can pick any flavor provided it is vanilla. And just like at Ford's, working at Beard Papa is a mind-numbing dehumanizing process: pick a shell on the right, pump cream in it in front of you, put it on a tray on the left, dust it with powedered sugar, wrap it in a thin paper. Repeat. The cashier would yell how many puffs in each order, but the guy at the production chain would be out of sync really fast. So don't tell them we told you, but pay for one, and ask for twelve when you pick up. It might work.
What could take the puffs from very good to exceptional: if you get a warm one. We always ask at the Daly City Krispy Kreme shop to give us the doughnut fresh out of the frying bath: piping hot outside, meltingly tender inside, light and fluffy before the fat congeals when cooling down. We hope to catch a Beard Papa puff fresh out of the oven someday. We might succeed, as they are baked in front of you, and just like at Krispy Kreme, if you have thirty minutes to kill, you can follow the life of your order from a walnut-sized raw dough ball into a grown tennis ball of a pastry.
Other flavors will show up eventually: chocolate every day, and caramel, green tea, pumpkin, strawberry rotating for the last daily flavor spot. You can get coffee or tea there as well, which we haven't tried. The shop is clean, with bright yellow colors to cheer you up in an Ikea store kind of way and there are benches and no traffic in Yerba Buena lane, should you enjoy the puffs outside.
Beard Papa
$1.75 for vanilla, slightly more for other flavors
6 vanilla puffs for $10
99 Yerba Buena Lane
ph: 978.9972