One San Francisco Restaurant Owner’s Quest for the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie

Stanley Lui’s cookie-baking began as a side project for the New Taraval Cafe owner. Now, he’s hooked.

There aren’t too many diners like New Taraval Cafe left in San Francisco. It’s both a timeless piece of Americana nostalgia, with Irish breakfast and omelets on the plastic-sheathed menu, and a part of the city’s specific flavor of immigrant-owned and Asian-infused breakfast joints. New Taraval Cafe is even more singular, though, and that’s because its owner also has a penchant for baking inventive, delightful cookies on the side.

Stanley Lui took over his parents’ cafe after a childhood spent behind the scenes at the Outer Sunset staple. In addition to running the business, he also creates huge amounts of nostalgic and imaginative cookies. It started with a high-end chocolate chip cookie — not too sweet, but with lots of chocolate — and spread into tiramisu cookies, then sesame, ginger turmeric, and banana walnut options followed. Now he sells them at New Taraval Cafe and for pre-order, too, posting the gorgeous bakes on Instagram, under the handle Cookie Man Stan. “I realized I enjoyed the process of baking, this great transformation,” Lui says. “It’s like magic.”

When he went off to college at UC Davis to study chemistry, he mostly experimented in the kitchen, cooking for friends pursuing their various degrees. In 2008 he came back to the city to help run the restaurant, falling in love with the cafe and the community. He didn’t love the restaurant as a kid — it was just a thing that kept him and his family busy — but he was proud of how much people loved New Taraval. In 2010 he took over the family business permanently.

Lui’s cookie craze began innocently when he had a sudden, feverish urge to eat a chocolate chip cookie. It was 2014 and he had a specific vision of what he wanted: classic and soft-baked, a little bit of edge and not too sweet. It became his white whale. Lui’s chemistry background came back in a hurry, balancing ingredients alongside acidity and leavening agents. Getting that soft texture is a big part of Lui’s approach. He’s got the basics down pat, branching further into Grand Marnier caramels and matcha brownies, too. “I spent a couple of years adapting and molding my own recipe,” Lui says. “I had a lot of bad cookies and I had a lot of decent cookies to get to what I have now.”

He can’t be sure what lies ahead for his side project-turned-love-letter to confections. He’s still just breaking down the cost of goods and techniques for his bakes, reading books and blogs like Ideas in Food and Cooking Issues. He rotates flavors at the restaurant almost every week, putting new favorites into the diner now that he’s owned it longer than a decade. The regulars know him, he loves his people, and he’d like the cookies to have their own community hub, a permanent location all their own, someday. “There’s always this [thought of], ‘How can I turn this thing that I love into a cookie, then love that even more?’” Lui says. “It’s important to me to bring people together.”

New Taraval Cafe (1054 Taraval Street) is open Monday through Friday 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and Lui’s cookies are available at the restaurant while supplies last or for order through Instagram.

The chocolate chip cookie that started it all.