Specialty's is a small
coffeeshop chain in
San Francisco.
My Specialty's is located on
Spear Street two or three blocks south of the
Embarcadero BART station--with one
Starbucks a block or so off each side. Trust me when I say it beats
Starbucks to hell, and not just because Starbucks is...Starbucks. Specialty's has lovely cheap
coffee, plus all the fancy stuff (
lattes etc), but they are most famous for their
chocolate chip cookies. Huge lumps of lotsa
chocolate,
white,
milk, or
bittersweet, incredibly good. Excellent with
coffee, and the cheap
day old cookies are equally delicious. They also bake huge
cinnamon rolls with
cream cheese icing that you can smell a mile away, and
chocolate rolls (never seen these anywhere else) and deceptively plain-looking
brownies that
melt in your mouth. They also carry
savory pastries, all kinds of
scones,
muffins, all fresh baked right there. They also have lunch
salads and
fresh fruit salads (yum!). I can't recommend them highly enough. The only possible drawback is that they are almost literally a
hole in the wall with about as much
counter space as my old
apartment and nowhere to sit, but that's not too much of a problem, for stuff this good.
Specialty's is on the west side of the street, open from
early to 3 p. m. I stop there every morning for
coffee and a
sweet thing, around 8:30 a. m.