Flour & Branch — Restaurant in San Francisco

It is gonna be an extensive review, brace 🤪 I’ve been there three times. TLDR, really suggest to try at least once the breakfast Danish and cheese Danish pastries!

👩‍🍳🧑‍🍳👨‍🍳 First of all I would like to note amazing job of Lauren, a founder of the store, in hiring right people! I am really into pastries and visited a lot of different bakeries in SF. I’ve never seen staff that is so attentive and caring in here. These people explicitly fan out the energy of those in love with pastries and baking. Great job right there! This is what makes people want to come again for sure💪

🍽️☕️ The interior of the place is really cozy, I felt very comfortable there and liked every detail of the design.

🥐🥮 I didn’t try the cookies everyone is rating top-notch in other reviews.

As for pastries, I tried cheese danish, breakfast danish, croissant and pain au chocolat.

Below I will try to rate the pastries by my subjective taste🤪 Better to come and try on your own, probably what I didn’t like will be your favourite feature🙂

Breakfast danish - 5/5. I never tried something like that and was really impressed. Would take it again for sure.

Pain au chocolat - 4/5. I can’t rate it higher because of a dough itself, I will explain in croissant. But chocolate taste is 💥

Cheese danish -4/5. I love the cream they put on top there and berries are always fresh. I suggest you to try at least once for sure! Thought have same concern with dough as well.

Croissant - 3/5. Again, this all is subjective. But my concern with a dough is that it tastes more like a sweet bun. It doesn’t feel puffy and and as gentle as it should be.

Overall the main decrease in rates for me comes from dough structure in pastries. To me it feels that it lacks layers being clearly distinguished. Probably it is a feature of Danish dough for pastries? Then I just prefer French...

This is about their service.

Im not one who writes bad reviews especially for a place i liked and promoted and up until now had a good experience with. But i had a really terrible experience with one of the people at the shop - I'm not sure if it was an employee or founder. Either way I'm equally shocked and disappointed because it was one of my go to local businesses i was happy to support. I was buying cookies for a friend's birthday and by this point they had a limited selection. I was happy for them but wanted to buy 3 cookies due to the limited options. She told me that they were out of 2-cookie boxes and only had the box for 4-5 cookies. I said I didn't mind taking 3 in the box but she refused to give it to me in the box and instead giving me a paper bag insisting that the un-snug stacking of cookies in the box will hurt their brand image. I offered to pay for the box because it was for someone's birthday. She flatly refused and turned her back and stopped serving me. I finally was forced to buy 4. As I was a regular, while paying, I told the other person who I have interacted with before that I was really disappointed with the experience. She came to the payment place and started attacking me and said "you don't need to come back" in front ofanother customer. I was cordial all along and was shocked at how rude she was, not to mention unreasonable. It ruined my whole day. I appreciate details but if you think how you stack cookies inside a box is more important than how you treat your customers, you probably have brand and brand image all wrong. Basic cordial customer treatment is bare minimum no matter how good you think your products are. The behavior was unacceptable. Safe to say I won't be going back or promoting...

I’m really disappointed by the service.

I’m actually a returning customer, and I’ve never had an issue with the food itself. It’s consistently good. BUT！！the service this time was truly disappointing.

I ordered a pastry and stepped outside to take a quick call for just about 10 minutes. When I returned and politely asked if my order was ready, the staff responded with a sarcastic comment about how I’m “not patient enough” simply because I stepped out. That alone was off-putting.

Even when I was placing my order earlier, the same staff didn’t really listen to what I was saying and gave me a look that felt frankly discriminatory. It made the whole experience uncomfortable and upsetting.

To be honest, I left feeling bad and disrespected.

—REPLY to your reply:

I’m really disappointed by your response. I left my review honestly based on my personal experience—and I believe I have every right to do so as a paying customer.

First, just to clarify: the person you mentioned as “another customer” was actually my friend. We came in together and waited in front of the counter for quite a while. You didn’t acknowledge us at all until I stepped closer and said “hello. I want to order …” If you have a monitor or camera, I’m sure you can check that. She asked me to order first because she needed more time to decide, so I’m not sure why you’re claiming I didn’t allow you to assist her

Second, I have to ask—do you really consider your comment about me being “not patient enough” and the facial expression you gave me as polite? From a customer’s perspective, it felt dismissive.

I’m not here to argue—I just think it’s important for businesses to take feedback with humility instead of turning it into a...