Fro-Yo Rankings: The Loving Cup in San Francisco

With the recent cold snap we've been having around the Bay Area, it's probably hard to read about frozen yogurt. But that's the thing about living here. The micro-climates just keep a changin'.

Last weekend it was warm enough to explore the neighborhoods and get some fro-yo. I have to thank reader Missee, who commented recently in my post about Fraiche to say I should try this place called The Loving Cup in the city.

I'd never heard of the Loving Cup, but mostly because I think it's more known for its rice pudding, and because it's in the Russian Hill/Polk Gulch neighborhood, which I rarely venture out to because I'm not an antiques freak. ;-)

Walking in, it has the feel of an old-time candy store, and you see the display case filled with large bowls of rice pudding of an assortment of flavors. (Who knew you could make so many flavors for rice pudding.) Actually, gourmet rice pudding was a hot thing for awhile a couple of years ago. But I wasn't here for the rice pudding (and I couldn't imagine getting both pudding and yogurt), so I turned my attention to the frozen yogurt.

Loving Cup helps you with the ordering by organizing the steps and the ingredients. You start with the base (vanilla or chocolate) and then start adding on, with fruits (usually frozen during this time of year) and the typical assortment of toppings using cookies, crackers, nuts, grains, and candy.

I picked a vanilla froyo and asked for blueberries and raspberry. What I didn't realize was that Loving Cup blends the fruit into the yogurt, so each cup is "lovingly" made to your order creating a new yogurt flavor. I didn't realize this because then I wouldn't have mixed those two fruits together. I just thought the blue and the red would look pretty as toppings against a white vanilla yogurt. So that's how I ended up with the cup that looks like the above, and old bubble gum looking frozen yogurt. This is the medium size.

I gave my fro-yo a try, and right off the taste was not the slightly tart fro-yo of recent craze. Too bad because I'm more partial to the partly tart fro-yo because then you know you're eating a flavor. This one tasted almost bland, and with the combination of the fruits, I think it created this odd almost bubble gum texture. The fro-yo was thick, but I wouldn't say creamy. I'm not sure how to describe it, but I wasn't a fan.

Loving Cup seems like a fun idea, and I saw people coming in and instead of mixing in fruits getting chocolate ganache dripped on top, and that's probably more a favorite that creating your own fruit flavor. Maybe next time I might go for the rice pudding.

Single Guy’s Fro-yo Rankings:

1. Red Mango, Palo Alto
2. Pinkberry, Southern California and San Jose
3. Fraiche, Palo Alto and San Francisco
4. Mr. Green Bubble, Oakland
5. Tuttimelon, San Francisco
6. YoCup, San Francisco
7. Icebee, San Francisco
8. Yoppi, San Francisco
9. Jubili, San Francisco
10. Tutti Frutti, Oakland
11. SoGreen, San Francisco
12. Yogurt Harmony, Berkeley
13. Creations, Berkeley
14. Cultivé Frozen Yogurt, San Francisco
15. The Loving Cup, San Francisco
16. Yogen Früz, San Francisco

The Loving Cup, 2356 Polk St., San Francisco. PH: 415.440.6900. www.lovingcupsf.com