West Side Cookies

Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies – Levain Bakery
Levain Bakery

So before we began this Best Thing I Ever Ate tour, we formed a book club, which we named “Booze Before Books” (the name should make clear where our priorities lie).  This fact is relevant only because the next three locations on our tour came as a result of an all-you-can-drink book club brunch on the Upper West Side.

So Needless to Say, This Sign Was a Useful Reminder

After dining at the Sunburnt Calf, and downing approximately a dozen greyhounds (vodka and grapefruit juice, for those wondering), we begin stumbling down Amsterdam Avenue with our fellow book club members in tow.  Ginger, who apparently thinks Ke$ha is the poet laureate of our generation, is once again spouting on about the days she “wakes up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy,” so you can imagine the scene.

Now, years ago, Ginger spotted Levain Bakery on the Food Network and exposed Vodka to its wonder.  Since then, Vodka has turned most everyone who visits her into Levain Bakery addicts, particularly when it comes to their one-pound cookies.  So naturally, while frolicking down Amsterdam, we decide that we need to introduce our fellow readers to Levain.

The Holy Grail of Cookies

On Best Thing I Ever Ate, Rocco DiSpirito went to Levain to talk about their dark chocolate chip cookies as part of the CHOCOLATE episode.  And so, even though we have both been to Levain multiple times and eaten all four flavors of their cookies, we of course need to “try” Rocco’s favorite in an effort towards tour completion.  Leaving our friends in our dust, we plop down at a table a few stores away and dive in… to this cookie that we have already tasted many times before.

A Whole Pound of Cookieness

Pulling the cookie apart, it is all that we remember: tough on the outside, warm, gooey, and overflowing with chocolate on the inside.  In fact, the chocolate coats our fingers to such an extent that we find ourselves bathing our hands with our tongues in the rapid motions of a cat.  But these cookies are worth the mess: they are one of a kind.

Get Ye to This Cookie Pronto

In truth, the dark chocolate chip cookie is not necessarily our favorite flavor.  Vodka prefers the chocolate chip walnut, and Ginger the oatmeal raisin (there is also a dark chocolate peanut butter variety).  But no matter which cookie you get, you cannot go wrong.  It is an impossibility.  The Levain cookies are the best you will ever eat.

Especially after a full morning of downing vodka grapefruits.

This is What Love Looks Like

Levain Bakery’s Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies: 5 stars*

*Certifiable Best Thing We Ever Ate