Pine Cone Diner Review


Pine Cone Diner 60 Fourth St. Point Reyes Station, CA 415.663.1536 www.thepineconediner.com
Winner BunRab.com 2005 best milkshake award

What kind of conehead doesn’t pine for a great burger? Not me. When I heard there was a diner that served the real deal, it was time to gain some counter intelligence.

Service:
Friendly and efficient. I had heard that the service was brusque but I didn’t find that to be true. The folks who work there are super nice.

Atmosphere:
Fun and funky. There are collections of china, miscellaneous artwork, and the virgin of Guadalupe adorning the walls. Homemade curtains, hand painted pinecone trim on the walls. It’s super cool.

The breakfast menu looked good enough to motivate me to arrive before their 2:30 p.m. cutoff next time.

This is a great place to have a meal before ducking across the street to Cowgirl Creamery (to pick up some of their incredible cheese) or walking down the street to Marin Sun Farms and pick up some fresh eggs and meat. But you don’t really need to look beyond the Mocha Milkshake for incentive to make tracks here.

Cheeseburger with cheddar ($8.25):
Ordered and received medium rare. This tasty meat comes from Marin Sun Farms’ organic, grass-fed beef. Although the cheeseburger was mighty tasty, I wish the bun was slightly more robust. It started to weaken when those lovely beef juices hit it.
This comes with a choice of fries, soup of the day or potato salad The soup was composed of cubed tofu, and limp veggies including green beans and mushrooms all of which had a similar texture and blandness. I should have ordered the fries with this instead.

Farmstead Bleu Cheeseburger ($9.75):
Ordered and received medium rare. This pungent cheese overpowered the burger. It was a shame to push such high quality meat to the background. Next time I’ll stick with Swiss or Cheddar.
The fries were crisp, greaseless and short lived.

Mocha Milkshake ($5.95):
This incredible chocolate shake is made with ice cream and ground coffee beans blended into a thick, creamy, caffeinated reason for giving up solid food. I have had espresso shakes before, but this one is the best. For those of you who don’t prefer chocolate, there is an espresso milkshake made with vanilla ice-cream.

Coffee:
They use coffee from Tom and Dave’s in San Rafael. It’s very good, on par with Mr. Espresso, but relatively unknown.

Strawberry Rhubarb pie (about $4):
I love pie. I love seeing it under those rabbit proof lids. I love ordering it. I love eating it. This pie had a nice flaky crust and lots of rhubarb. I like rhubarb pie slightly tangier (with less sugar) but I think that probably puts most folks off so I get why they make it sweeter. The strawberries melded into a pink fruity rhubarby homey tasting comfort cushion. I will order pie here again.

Here's another (drool, slurp!) photo of it:

----- Overall Rating: -----

Two and a half carrots out of four.

This is a genuine, funky, cool diner with good comfort food. They use great ingredients from local sources. The espresso and mocha shakes are a knockout.

"Great"

Pine Cone Diner Bathroom Rating

Clean and well stocked.