Bay Area’s reborn Specialty’s Cafe & Bakery opens a second location

Sandwiches, freshly baked cookies are now closer to restaurant's San Francisco, East Bay customers

Three years after resurrecting their popular Specialty’s Cafe & Bakery in Mountain View, owners Dawn and Craig Saxton have opened a second Peninsula restaurant.

The new cafe is at Sierra Point, a pharma-heavy business park in Brisbane. The location was selected for its proximity to San Francisco, where they’ve been gaining more customers. Otherwise, Craig Saxton said, “it’s a long haul for our delivery vehicles from Mountain View.”

However, “while it’s primarily a kitchen to service our catering demand, it’s open to the public and anyone is welcome.”

That puts Specialty’s crave-worthy Roast Turkey with Cranberry Chutney sandwiches, Italian Three Bean Vegetable soup and Salted Rye Whiskey Dark Chocolate cookies closer to the original chain’s East Bay and North Bay customers.

The Saxtons launched the business in 1987 in San Francisco with Dawn’s recipes, then expanded widely. For years, Specialty’s specialty had been its tech-savvy approach to serving the weekday lunch crowd and delivering boxed lunches for office meetings. They sold the company in 2017, then bought it out of Chapter 7 bankruptcy after the new ownership group’s pandemic struggles.

The Mountain View location at Ellis Street, just off Highway 101, reopened in 2021. The Saxtons created some new sandwiches, salads and pastries for that menu and brought back some old favorites. (“Same cookies,” they said at the time. “We’re not crazy!”)

The current menu features 16 sandwiches, six breakfast sandwiches, a huge array of scones, muffins, cookies, palmiers and rugelach and catering options like a Fruit, Nut and Brie Platter.

Details: Open weekdays from 6:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 880 Sierra Point Parkway, Brisbane; www.specialtys.com