As the 7x7 food department’s editorial assistant, I was asked today to do a little guest blog, so here it goes …

I’m really picky when it comes to baked goods. Blame my mom. She’s the pastry chef. Her sour cream scones have ensured that I have rarely, if ever, found another scone to be worthy. The fact that such a great pastry is often executed as a bland, baking-soda-flavored hockey puck has led me to skip the scone entirely unless it’s mom-made.



Enter John Campbell’s Irish Bakery (5625 Geary Blvd., 415-387-1536). This new bakery adjacent to the Blarney Stone has forced me to overturn my strict anti-scone policy. Fluffy, soft, smelling of cream, and studded with raisins, they are everything a scone should be.

John Campbell’s also turns out some humongous breakfast sandwiches called “Belfast Baps,” replete with two different pork products—sausage and Irish bacon, piled onto scrambled eggs and cheese, and sandwiched between their own Irish crusty bread. Sausage rolls, soda breads, and sweets such as massive cream-filled buns can also be had, but the scones are—how do the kids say it—the bomb?

While visiting recently, my father was charged with walking down to John Campbell’s and picking up some scones for us to have for breakfast the next morning. He got five scones into the bag, but only three made it back to my flat eight blocks later. The next morning I got up to make us coffee and see him off. Mysteriously, the rest of the scones had disappeared during the night. Or should I say, not so mysteriously.