Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory

This guide to the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in San Francisco opens with a 1983 mock trial, the Court of Historical Review, convened to settle who really invented the fortune cookie: a caretaker of the city's Japanese Tea Garden or a Los Angeles noodle-shop founder. It follows that old rivalry into the tiny storefront off Ross Alley itself, where one family has run the business since 1962, folding cookies by hand off a spinning griddle much as those early bakers did. No mold shapes the cookies here, just fingers working fast against cooling dough.