You deserve a cookie. We all deserve a cookie. Life is hard, easy pleasures are few and fleeting—why not have a little something sweet? Naturally, we do not want to waste our time on an unworthy cookie. As with any New York City foodstuff, you could go for established sublimity, model cookies of universally agreed-upon excellence. Call them the old guard: your gooey chocolate-chip cookies from Culture Espresso, your buttery pineapple Linzers from Té Company, the legendary black-and-white from William Greenberg (though, if we’re being honest, the version at Orwashers Bakery outperforms, on the merits). But, if you find yourself wanting something a little different, these three are, to my mind, the New York cookie new guard: fresh classics in the making.
The Rye-Caraway Chocolate-Chip Cookie at Agi’s Counter
When Agi’s (a tiny, innovative Ashkenazi-ish restaurant with a stand-alone bakery counter) first opened, a few years ago, I felt that my life was changed, on some tiny but important level, by their shortbread cookie, a crumbly disk of butter and sugar shot through with a gruff note of caraway seed. Caraway is an audacious cookie ingredient; the flavor is licorice and citrus, tuned to a minor key; it’s perhaps most famous as the ingredient most people don’t want in a loaf of Ashkenazi-style rye bread. In a sweet framework, though, it becomes wild and intriguing. Agi’s phased out the shortbread last year in favor of a caraway-studded chocolate-chip cookie, and I was skeptical that the perfection of the former iteration could be improved upon. What a thrill to learn that the current offering is somehow even better: the chocolate’s edge of bitterness, the molasses notes of the brown sugar, the sly sourness of rye flour in the dough—the caraway belongs in this cookie, it feels inevitable and ingenious and correct.
Helen, Help Me!
E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.
The Guava Cream-Cheese Piecrust Cookie at Janie’s Life-Changing Baked Goods
It’s rare to get true structural innovation in the world of cookies—for all our experimentation in weird and wondrous flavors, the cookie’s fundamental pastry unit remains more or less the same. The piecrust cookie at Janie’s (which opened its first brick-and-mortar shop in 2021, and now has three Manhattan locations), however, really is novel: a sweet filling, usually pie-inspired, sandwiched between a circle of flaky piecrust, on the bottom, and an insulating layer of streusel, on top. Sure, it’s got all the elements of a pie, but somehow (maybe due to its teeny-tiny, barely two-inch-diameter size) it’s resolutely not pie—it has that essential, ineffable quality that the cookbook author Ben Mims identifies in his forthcoming baking opus “Crumbs” as “the soul of a cookie.” I haven’t tried a single variety here that I don’t roundly adore (cranberry apple ginger! Apple and honey!), but perhaps the most inspired is filled with guava and cream cheese, an apparent riff on Cuban pastelitos, with the heady, sticky intensity of the tropical fruit just barely tempered by the smooth schmear. (Great news for the far-flung: Janie’s does mail order, though, alas, not for the guava cream-cheese flavor, owing to perishability.)
The Cannibal Cookie, at Red Gate Bakery, features a classic butter dough and pieces of Oreo-style cookies in lieu of chocolate chips.
The Cannibal Cookie at Red Gate Bakery
Finding myself in urgent need of a showstopping gift for a cookie obsessive not long ago, I turned to Charlotte Druckman, the food writer and coauthor of the pastry newsletter “The Sweethearts,” for guidance. Her answer was three words: Red Gate Bakery. The tiny Lower East Side shop, open since 2019, is where the baker Greg Rales turns out creations that are equal parts childhood nostalgia and willful weirdness, though always exquisitely delicious. His cheekily named Cannibal Cookie begins with a classic butter dough, but instead of chocolate chips or bits of walnut he stirs in crushed Oreo-style cream-filled sandwich cookies (also sold at the bakery). It’s a cookie-spiked cookie that features a rousing mishmash of textures and flavors, with the primary cookie’s golden face broken up by a crazing of chocolate-black from the mixed-in bits of cookie No. 2. A dozen of them, wrapped up in a box, made a triumphant gift. ♦
