Eastern Bakery

The black bean cakes and moon cakes are old… it’s so dry and crumby. Will not recommend to friends.

Delicious moon cakes! Softest moon cakes I’ve ever had. The pork bun was amazing as well, nice and warm.

Walking around Chinatown we stumble across this little bakery. They offered a variety of goodies and have delicious baked char siu bao. The lady who helped me was really sweet. She tried to upsell me some items. I got Chinese candy. Delicious. Check it out. Lots of good stuff!

Rating is solely based on pineapple bun. Wished the bun had some custard inside. I would’ve given this place 5 stars if it did.
WOW! Amazing delicious, affordable, and President Bill Clinton has been to it!

Best Coffee Crunch cake!!!
Long lines… Moon cake was good, Chinese lotus cake was delicious… If you like sesame balls… They’re humongous here… They are friendly… Limited English but friendly.
The only thing is… There’s no ambience… Great for food to go…

Stopped in for the first time ever at about 7:30 tonight to see what they had. Walked out with a lemon pinwheel cake, two steamed pork buns, and a giant almond cookie.
Cookie was good, nothing spectacular other than its an almond cookie x 5!
The lemon cake was super soft, lemony sweet and tart, but the sponge cake lacked a little sweetness. But still excellent regardless. The pork buns were excellent. Soft, sweet and savory, moist and a really good meat to bread ratio. I’d eat them over and over again. The lady working was polite, but a bit rushed, speeding us thru our ordering. If you’re going thru China Town do yourself a favor and give them a shot.

Great place… wonderful steamed buns… especially liked the cocktail buns. Good egg custard tarts and lotus seed pastries of various stripes… great red bean buns.

This place got such good ratings… I somehow must have ordered the wrong things? I also came around 5pm so maybe everything was getting too old?
Ambiance: nothing about this place felt clean, but I didn’t factor that into my rating because most of China town is like this. The plates, plastic ware (that had been washed and reused), tables, sauce holders, chairs… all of them could have been wiped down more.
Food: The person I came with LOVES Chinese food so I was really hoping she would enjoy this. Nothing that we had would call us back.
–Pork bun: relatively decent ratio of meat to bun. Not terrible, but not great. Both the bun and the meat were sweet.
–Chicken combo bun: there was some boiled egg in here along with other random meat-​like looking stuff. I’ve had a Vietnamese version of this that was delicious. This tasted bland and old.
–Pork dim sum: the best thing we ordered but that’s not saying much. Perhaps it would have been better if it were fresh.
–Vegetable dim sum: horrible. There was not any vegetable in here. It was literally gooey peanuts. We both took a couple of bites and left the rest.
Service: the ladies in here were very friendly and kind. Definitely nice to have a smiling face, especially in Chinatown in the evening. This is what earned them a couple of stars in my book.

Crazy coffee crunch cake.
A friend of ours was celebrating her birthday up in Tahoe, and her boyfriend asked me to pick up an Asian birthday cake, preferably coffee-​flavored. The first thought was tiramisu, but Unilocal also pointed me to coffee crunch cakes from Yasukochi’s Sweet Stop and Eastern Bakery. Looking over reviews, Yasukochi’s was the favorite in terms of quality, but Eastern was preferred for quantity. With an entire cabin to feed, we opted for the latter.
And talk about quantity. An 8″ cake serves 8 people for $ 20.10, 10″ for $ 30.10, 12″ serves 15 – 19 for $ 40.10, and a half sheet is $ 55. If you want writing on the top of the cake, you have to forego some coffee crunch toppings. We called in the glorious 12″ cake to pick up the following afternoon. Upon opening the bright pink lid, we found a humongous coffee crunch-​laden cake that fed our crew’s sweet teeth for the entire weekend with a bowl of leftovers for the ride home.
In terms of taste, it’s good but not great. The coffee crunch is very sticky and slightly saccharine. Fortunately, the sponge cake and fluffy whipped cream are not sickeningly sweet, so a good number of us ended up scraping off the coffee crunch bits. Thinking back on it, I would have sacrificed that excess of coffee crunch bits in order to have birthday writing on the cake.
Coffee crunch cake sans a bit of crunch = perfect.

Avoid their dim sum, but do get their coffee crunch cake. It’s simply scrumptious.
Their dough that they use is thick and not thin for the peel of the dim sum steamed orders.
It’s a small spot for the dry bakery goods and not much of a sit down place.
Convenient grab, but if you go more central Chinatown, dim sum fares better that way.

Above average selection of baked goods and pastries, but not as much variety as you would typically see at a Chinese bakery. One thing they do specialize in is mooncakes, which are pretty good. Not quite as good as in Asia, but passable in SF (you should probably get one here if you’ve never tried one). The egg yolk in the middle can take some getting used to, but overall mooncakes are calorie bombs that are worth the hit once a year!
I’ve had a few things from here — baked cha siu buns, one of their mooncakes, and a few other assorted pastries. Everything was alright, but I’ve had better of each thing elsewhere. The baked cha siu buns were a bit light on the cha siu as well. They have a lot of history, as is apparent upon walking in, but I just wasn’t that impressed. Nothing’s really pulling me back here as there are better places on Stockton a few blocks away.

COCKTAIL BUNS! They are so gooooooooood!
I came in one late Saturday night looking for their butter cream buns (been coming here for a while), only to find there was only one left (there were 3 of us). The man behind the counter told me if I would like to try their cocktail buns because they also had coconut in them.
I said why not, paid, walked outside and huddled with my sisters to taste these suckers.
We ate 4 of them in less than 5 minutes.
We shamefully walked back in, where to my surprise the man started talking to us in Spanish (MY PEOPLE!!!). I asked for 6 more buns, and had a lovely conversation with the dude about speaking Spanish (you are gold in my eyes sir) then we went on our merry way with our tasty buns.
Now about these buns. They were sitting in a steam box, so they we moist and warm. Inside of them is this coconut mixture that pairs well with the not so sweet bun.
I highly recommend taking one of these babies, along with their other offerings (i’ve had the coffee crunch cake, the moon cakes, and other confections).
Maybe on the next round I’ll get a savory bun just to keep it interesting. Oh yeah, its cash only and can get kind crowded, so make sure you’re ready if order!

Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom.
Best BBQ baked pork bun I’ve had in a long time. And cheap! Bring cash. A fun stop by in Chinatown.

This bakery is a landmark for Chinatown. It’s a must see & try if you’re visiting San Fran for the first time. The owners are amazingly sweet and the gentlemen is so full of life it’ll brighten your day. He’s extremely helpful and even offers to ship product to your home if your heart desires it at a later time.
My traveling partner was on the hunt for some sort of Asian bread and couldn’t for the life of her remember the name of it. After walking into Eastern Bakery and describing the bread to the older male owner he allowed her to try a piece of his fresh baked bread. It knocked her socks off. That’s it!!! she said. I don’t do yeast but she described it as better than Hawaiian rolls (I definitely grew up on those delicious, moist, succulent Hawaiian rolls).
I opted for the dark chocolate covered fortune cookies; being that I’m addicted to dark chocolate and all. I also went with a moon cake which was superb. The texture was unique, soft with a jelly-​like sweet inside.
You must take a trip through the bakery; it’s not fancy but it’s awesome in its own right.
Thank me later,
~Christy

I think either pineapple buns are your thing or they’re not. They’re not pineapple flavored or have anything to do with pineapple. It’s just a bun with a sugary crust on top that resembles a pineapple skin. It’s sugary. The bun is soft bread that mushes in your mouth.
80¢ per bun, cash only

I heard that this bakery is the oldest bakery in SF Chinatown and it sure looks like it because the bakery looks really run down and ancient!
They have assortment of Chinese mooncakes to choose from and lots of random Chinese pastries. They have these interesting looking chocolate dipped fortune cookies that I do not want to try… lol
Apparently according to other Unilocal reviewers, they are known for their coffee crunch cake. I knew I definitely needed to try it and I did by ordering it for my coworker’s birthday. It was delicious and it didn’t taste or look like those disgusting Chinese bakery fruit birthday cakes. BEST CHINATOWN CAKE EVER!!!
Thanks fellow Unilocalers for the awesome recommendation!

Rice candy roll — solid, as good as it gets for this item.
Smackies — light crispy not too sweet.

Review is only for lopo bang– wifey winter melon «cakes».
$ 1.75/small
Lots of layers of Lardy freshness, but for a true connoisseur, it’s lacking a looseness that is difficult to achieve. A stellar cake ought be filled with flakiness, dry enough on the texture, but still soft when biting into it.
This was not.
Inside wintermelon filling was also not that delicious soft chew with fluff that HK excels at. I dunno– not as good as I once recall. Either that or I’m getting darned pickier!
The place is a mess, just as it always is! Hire an organizer and just keep it up!