The Mission has been San Francisco's dessert neighbourhood for twenty years, and the standard crawl — ice cream, chocolate, pastry, park — is one of the best short walks in any American city. It is also out of date. The version people still copy from old lists includes a stop that is no longer in the neighbourhood, and following it means walking fifteen minutes to a closed door. The good news is that the route is easy to fix and arguably better once you do.
Two of the stops on the classic version of this walk have changed hands or moved in the last couple of years, and the crawl people share online has not been updated. Tell Karpo which evening you are walking and where you are starting, and get the current version of the route, what is open at that hour, and how long each queue really is.
The change to know about first
Humphry Slocombe's Harrison Street shop, the original Mission location that made the neighbourhood synonymous with strange ice cream flavours, is no longer trading; the operation continues at the Ferry Building, which keeps daily hours until ten in the evening. That is a twenty-minute journey from where the old shop stood, so it is a different outing rather than a stop on this walk. If you specifically want that ice cream, do the Ferry Building on a separate afternoon and enjoy the water instead of the mural.
Bi-Rite is now the anchor, not the alternative
With the Harrison Street shop gone, Bi-Rite Creamery on 18th Street becomes the fixed point of the crawl. It has the queue to prove it, and the queue is the honest cost of the stop — twenty minutes on a warm evening is normal. The neighbourhood technique is to order at the window, walk one block to Dolores Park and eat there, which is what the park is for and what the shop's location has always assumed. Doing this at the start of the walk rather than the end also means you are not carrying a cone through the rest of it.
Valencia is the chocolate half
Dandelion Chocolate on Valencia is the other genuine institution on this route, a small-batch factory and café where the drinking chocolate is the thing to order — European style, thick, closer to a dessert than a drink. It is a sitting-down stop rather than a walking one, which makes it the natural middle of the crawl. Pair it with one of the Valencia and Guerrero bakeries for a pastry; this corridor has more good laminated dough per block than anywhere else in the city.
The Latin American half of the neighbourhood is the part people skip
The Mission's oldest dessert culture is not artisanal ice cream. It is the panaderías along 24th Street, the churro carts that appear near the BART plazas in the evening, and the paletería freezers with fruit bars in flavours no scoop shop makes. A dessert crawl that never leaves 18th and Valencia has only seen half the neighbourhood, and the 24th Street half is cheaper, later and considerably more interesting. Walk south.
Timing the walk
Start at six and you get golden hour in Dolores Park, an open chocolate café and the bakeries before they sell out. Start at eight and the pastry stops are gone but the ice cream queues have shortened and the street carts have appeared. September evenings here are the warmest of the San Francisco year, and this is one of the few neighbourhoods where sitting outside after dark is genuinely comfortable — the Mission's microclimate is the reason the whole tradition exists.
Where to sit when you are done
The traditional endpoint of this walk is Dolores Park, and the practical detail is which part of it: the upper north-west slope catches the last light and the view, which is why it fills first on a warm evening, while the flatter southern end stays comfortable much later. Both are fine to sit on with something from a bakery. The park's public toilets and the surrounding streets get busy at weekends, so if the walk is running late, the quieter alternative is the small parks and stoops along Guerrero, where nobody minds someone eating an ice cream on a wall for ten minutes.
Practical notes
Humphry Slocombe is no longer on Harrison Street; the Ferry Building shop runs to ten daily and is a separate trip. Anchor on Bi-Rite Creamery on 18th and eat in Dolores Park a block away. Dandelion on Valencia is the sit-down chocolate stop. Walk south to 24th Street for panaderías, paletas and evening churro carts. Six o'clock for pastries and the park, eight o'clock for shorter queues and street carts.
Tags: #DessertCrawl #MissionDistrict #SanFrancisco #IceCream #Chocolate #DoloresPark #CoffeeAndDessert #SFFood #Valencia #24thStreet #SFWeekend #FoodWalk #SFGuide
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Ask Karpo first
Want the current version of this walk, with the stops that are actually open at the hour you are going and honest queue times? Ask Karpo for the route in order, what to order at each stop, and where to sit down at the end.
