Down a narrow alley off Jackson Street in Chinatown, a tiny shop has been making fortune cookies by hand since 1962. Workers sit at vintage machines, pulling warm wafers off a griddle and folding fortunes into them one by one. You can watch the process, buy a bag of fresh cookies (some dipped in chocolate), and even have custom fortunes inserted.
The shop is cramped, slightly chaotic, and charges a small fee for photos. It takes about five minutes to see -- just long enough to buy a bag of flat, unfolded "misfortune" cookies and learn that San Francisco, not China, is almost certainly where the fortune cookie was invented.