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The 25 Essential Pastries to Eat in New York City

October 21, 2025
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The 25 Essential Pastries to Eat in New York City
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What is a pastry? When T assembled a group of chefs and bakers to debate the most essential pastries in New York City right now, that was the first question. Does it need to be portable? Shaun Velez, 39, the executive pastry chef at the Upper East Side restaurant Daniel, says he considers his intricate desserts (like a chocolate mousse tart served with hojicha ice cream and yogurt meringue) to qualify even though they can’t be taken away. Does a pastry even need to be baked? That seemed obvious — but then there’s the doughnut, which is typically fried.

One thing everyone could agree on: New York is currently having a pastry renaissance; across the boroughs, new bakeries are drawing lines of customers. “There were barely dessert shops 20 years ago,” says Christina Tosi, 43, the chef and founder of Milk Bar, which now has 10 locations across the country. She started selling birthday cake truffles and cornflake cookies in the East Village in 2008. Five years later, the pastry chef Dominique Ansel created the Cronut at his namesake bakery in SoHo, ushering in an era of sharing baked goods on Instagram. Despite its influence online and off, the Cronut didn’t make the list below: “It’s been celebrated well enough,” Velez says, and the experts wanted to highlight the spirit of experimentation that’s thrived since the pandemic, when many out-of-work chefs began selling innovative pastries through delivery boxes and pop-ups.

Along with Velez and Tosi, the panelists who created this list (part of our ongoing T25 series) included Camari Mick, 31, a former executive pastry chef at the NoLIta restaurants the Musket Room and Raf’s who recently announced her plans to open an Afro-Caribbean restaurant; the baker and cookbook author Melissa Weller, 53, who in September opened the bakery Bub’s in NoHo; the pastry chef Lauren Tran, 36, the founder of the Vietnamese American cafe and bakery Bánh by Lauren in Manhattan’s Chinatown; and Tanya Bush, 28, the pastry chef at Little Egg in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, who also covers food for T. Each participant nominated at least 10 pastries, both sweet and savory — they were allowed to include one another’s creations, but not their own — ahead of our meeting at The New York Times on a hot July day. Tosi joined on video from Nashville, where she lives part-time.

Some nominees were eliminated because they could no longer be purchased: Weller brought up the beloved pretzel croissant from City Bakery, which closed in 2019. And the group left off lots of classic European pastries like French pain au chocolat and Swedish cardamom buns — “you can go to another city,” Mick says — in favor of those that represent New York’s incomparable diversity: Most of the selections are expressions of their bakers’ identities and cultures. The panelists acknowledged that, on a different day, they might’ve made a different list. As if to prove that point, one of their original choices also became unavailable shortly after the panel convened: the apple strudel from the French Viennese restaurant Koloman, which closed its NoMad location in August with plans to reopen elsewhere next year. Consider that an invitation to try the rest while you can. — Ella Riley-Adams

This conversation has been edited and condensed. Though numbered, the entries below aren’t ranked; the pastries appear roughly in the order in which they were discussed.

1. The Carrot Cake at Lloyd’s Carrot Cake

In the 1980s, Lloyd Adams, then a substance-abuse counselor living in Harlem, started making carrot cakes to eat with his friends while watching Knicks games. With his Caribbean grandmother’s recipe as a guide, he used a generous six cups of finely grated carrots — along with walnuts and raisins — for each 10-inch round cake, then covered it all with cream cheese frosting. The results were delicious enough that his friends convinced him to open his own bakery, Lloyd’s Carrot Cake, in Riverdale in 1986. Almost four decades later, the menu has grown to include red velvet, pineapple coconut and other varieties, but the original remains the biggest draw: The bakery can run through 750 pounds of carrots a day between the Bronx shop and a second location in East Harlem, which opened in 2010. Both are now run by Adams’s children, Lilka and Brandon, who’ve renovated the shops — the one in Riverdale is closed for construction until later this year — but haven’t messed with their father’s recipe. — Luke Fortney

1565 Lexington Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan; 6087 Broadway, Riverdale, Bronx (temporarily closed)

Tanya Bush: My one gripe is raisins, but that’s a personal preference.

Camari Mick: I don’t like raisins in anything, but they don’t faze me in this. It’s an amazing carrot cake — super moist.

Shaun Velez: It’s our go-to celebration cake for the staff.

Ella Riley-Adams: So are we saying a cake is a pastry?

Christina Tosi: It depends on the cake, and carrot cake is an interesting case. It blurs the line between a quick bread, a pound cake, a layer cake.

Bush: You can eat it for breakfast happily.

Tosi: Also, when I went to the French Culinary Institute for pastry, they taught us how to make carrot cake.

Weller: Oh, that’s right, they had raisins in theirs, and canned pineapple.

Tosi: A sponge-textured item can be a pastry, and I think this is one.

2. The Bánh Bò Nướng at Bánh by Lauren

The Vietnamese American pastry chef Lauren Tran had been working at Gramercy Tavern for five months when New York’s pandemic shutdowns began in 2020. Unemployed, she started selling her baked goods online under the name Bánh by Lauren. (In Vietnamese, bánh roughly translates to “cake” or anything made with flour.) Some merged French technique with Asian flavors (longan macarons, black sesame palmiers) while others, like the bánh bò nướng cake, skewed more traditional. In 2024, Tran opened Bánh by Lauren as a cafe in Chinatown, where bánh bò nướng — also called honeycomb cake, since its interior is riddled with air pockets caused by gas produced by the batter’s baking powder — remains a best seller. At many Vietnamese delis in the U.S., a mass-produced version is sold in pieces on Styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic, but Tran makes hers fresh every day, so the exterior remains crusty and the middle retains the pleasant chewiness of tapioca flour. Only faintly sweet, it gets its earthy depth and bright, jade green hue from pandan, a plant with a grassy vanilla flavor that’s popular in Southeast Asia. — Jason Chen

42 Market Street, Chinatown, Manhattan

Mick: So many people gave up during the pandemic and left the industry. Bành by Lauren is a classic New York story of fighting through, being your own advocate and making your own name.

Velez: It tells the story of her culture, bringing what I imagine was a childhood favorite into the melting pot of New York’s pastry scene. It has everything I look for in a dessert: texture, flavor and originality.

Bush: ​​The flavor is beautifully balanced — not too sweet, with a grassy, coconutty aroma from the pandan. I can house an entire loaf, which, lucky for me, she sells at the bakery.

3. The Knafeh at Ayat

When Abdul Elenani opened a Palestinian restaurant in Bay Ridge in the fall of 2020, his wife, Ayat Masoud, a lawyer, lent both her first name and her recipes. Together, they developed a menu featuring savory classics like mansaf, maklouba and musakhan (all of which feature meat with rice or flatbread) as well as the sweet, cheese-based dessert known as knafeh, which quickly emerged as a standout: Doused in ghee and baked to a delicate crisp, its shredded phyllo crust shatters into flakes when cut into with a fork. Inside, there’s a stretchy filling made from brined cheese, which is salty and tangy enough to balance out the sugar syrup poured on top. Through Ayat, which now has nine locations throughout New York and in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Elenani hopes to make Palestinian cuisine mainstream. And Masoud’s knafeh is as traditional as it gets, a carefully crafted dish that preserves and celebrates a small piece of Palestinian culture. — Nicole Acheampong

Multiple locations in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania

Mick: Sweet, cheesy, salty deliciousness. It’s best fresh out of the wood-fired oven.

Bush: I haven’t tried the knafeh. One thing that’s interesting about this panel is that we have to trust each other’s taste memory, and I trust Camari’s palate.

4. The Pine Nut Sun Cookie at Win Son Bakery

Early in her career, the pastry chef Danielle Spencer worked at the Gramercy restaurant Craft, where braised pine nuts were a salad-topping staple. Each day, she’d cook them until they became golden brown, and she came to find they were “addicting” — as was the butter they were cooked in. As a partner at Win Son Bakery, which opened in 2019 in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, spinning off from the chefs Josh Ku and Trigg Brown’s neighboring Taiwanese American restaurant, Win Son, Spencer found a new way to serve pine nuts: in what she calls “a simple, approachable cookie.” She starts with laminated puff pastry that’s enriched with extra flour for a stronger structure, flattening it into a quarter-inch thin sheet before layering on whole pine nuts caramelized in brown butter and rolling it into a tube, which she then slices into rounds. In the oven, the salty-sweet filling oozes and caramelizes, coating each spiral in a bronze, sticky bun-like glaze that — as its name suggests — shines like the sun. — Mackenzie Oster

164 Graham Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn; 23 Second Avenue, East Village, Manhattan

Melissa Weller: I put their millet mochi doughnut on my list, which they make to order. Win Son’s interpretation of Taiwanese pastry is so special to New York that I thought it was important to include.

Velez: I like the texture on the pine nut cookie, the bite, the nuttiness.

Bush: I will defend the millet mochi doughnut. It’s pleasingly chewy.

Lauren Tran: It’s a good doughnut, but I feel like the really great ones are in L.A.

Bush: So maybe we go for the pine nut cookie, which is really good.

5. The Maple Cruller at Daily Provisions

Every morning before the doors open at 7 a.m., bakers at the eight New York locations of Daily Provisions hand-pipe pâte à choux into circles, fry them in small batches and hand-dip the resulting crullers into an intensely maple-flavored glaze made with both syrup and extract. The veteran restaurateur Danny Meyer drew inspiration for the pastry from two baked goods he tasted on trips to Colorado — a maple scone at the now-closed Main Street Bakery in Aspen and a glazed cruller from the Natural Epicurean cafe at the Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs — and worked with the Daily Provisions pastry chef Daniel Alvarez to create a recipe combining the best aspects of both. The resulting crullers might look ordinary but, inside, they’re more akin to French canelés: eggy, aerated and rich with butterfat. Daily Provisions makes a cinnamon option as well as seasonal flavors (yuzu basil; hibiscus and pumpkin) but the maple is the star. For months after Daily Provisions first opened, they were often sold out by 11 a.m. Now, fresh batches are made throughout the day. — J.C.

Multiple locations in Manhattan; Brooklyn; Jersey City, N.J.; Cambridge, Mass.; and Washington, D.C.

Weller: I had it when Daily Provisions first opened [in 2017], then a number of years later I went back and it was fantastic, even better than when I had it in the beginning. It started this trend of pâte à choux doughnuts.

Mick: And every location is consistent.

Bush: I have a cruller on my menu that’s an homage to this one. A lot of other crullers in New York are delightful, and they all trace back to Daily Prov.

6. The Lysée at Lysée

The signature dessert at chef Eunji Lee’s three-year-old Flatiron bakery is smooth and white, but beneath its minimalist facade, there’s a lot happening. A hazelnut and praline sablé is layered with spongecake, chopped and roasted pecans (she uses the Elliot variety) and praline and brown-rice caramel. The alternatingly fluffy, gooey and crunchy little stack is surrounded by brown rice-infused mousse that tastes of nutty roasted grains and vanilla bean. Like the much-lauded desserts Lee made as the executive pastry chef at the TriBeCa restaurant Jungsik, the inventive recipes at Lysée combine French technique with Korean and American ingredients. Entremets, for example, were made in medieval France in versions both sweet and savory (the name means “between dishes”) and evolved in the 20th century to encompass intricate European desserts with multiple components, but the flowerlike pattern embossed on top of Lysée’s creation is inspired by traditional Korean roof tiles. — Ella Quittner

44 East 21st Street, Flatiron, Manhattan

Velez: That entremet speaks to her as a chef: to her experience, to her culture, to her impression of New York. It would be hard to pick a different one of her pastries over that.

Christina Tosi: It’s telling the story of pastry right now and what dessert in New York City is. You don’t have to go to the bar of a restaurant to get a pastry or a dessert; you can go into one of these beautiful shops.

Bush: All of her pastries are visually stunning, and that feels contemporary, when so many people are consuming pastries with their eyes on Instagram.

7. The Biscone at Brooklyn Granary & Mill

As its name suggests, the biscone is a shape-shifter, playing the role of scone when slathered in cultured butter and jam, and standing in for a biscuit when topped with housemade pickles and slices of ham from Sunset Park’s Ends Meat. Brooklyn Granary & Mill sells it both ways. Made from a buttermilk dough that combines spelt with a soft white winter wheat variety known as Frederick, the barely sweet baked good is an ideal showcase for the bakery’s milled-in-house whole grains; the combination of flours yields a nutty, tender crumb with buttery richness. After years spent working at Dan Barber’s upstate New York restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns, which also produces its own flour, the baker Patrick Shaw-Kitch wanted to establish an urban grain mill that would work directly with regenerative farmers in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. He and his wife, Laura Huss, searched for two years before finding a 3,000-square-foot space spread over two floors of a new building in Gowanus, which they opened this past June. Their two stone mills now turn out about a ton of whole-grain flour a week, serving both wholesale and retail customers and supplying Shaw-Kitch’s in-house bakery, which, in addition to biscones, offers cookies, croissants and several breads. — Becky Cooper

240 Huntington Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn

Bush: Once I had this scone, I thought, “I never need to eat another scone or biscuit again.” It was nutty and supple and flaky.

Tran: You can really taste the quality of the wheat he’s working with. And everything’s hyperlocal. He just dropped off some flour for me, and I was like, “I have no idea what to do with this einkorn flour, but thank you!”

8. The Potato Sauerkraut Knish at Elbow Bread

Working in the pastry kitchens of New York restaurants like Sadelle’s and Simon and the Whale at the Freehand Hotel, the baker Zoë Kanan attracted a following with her chocolate babka and savory Turkish simit. During the pandemic, she sold doughnuts and bagels through a series of pop-ups under the name Zoë’s Doughies and, in 2024, she opened her own shop where Division and Ludlow meet Canal on the Lower East Side, calling it Elbow in a nod to the intersection. The bakery pays tribute to the neighborhood’s Jewish history with items like bialys, challah rolls and knishes, which were once a staple of the area, sold from pushcarts and storefronts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The warm, hearty pockets of dough containing potato or kasha (roasted buckwheat) are still served at the city’s traditional delis and bakeries, but Kanan’s version is lighter and more nuanced. She wraps six layers of flaky pastry around a mound of mashed Yukon Gold potato flecked with crunchy salt and flavored with sauerkraut, onions, sour cream and fresh dill. In the oven, the butter from the pastry drips out, crisping up the bottom. Best eaten warm, it tastes first of pickles, then of sweet caramelized onion and, by the end, like an especially delicious potato chip. — E.Q.

1 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan

Tran: When they first opened, [my staff and I] bought everything. I thought I didn’t need to eat a knish and now it’s my favorite thing on the menu.

Weller: Knish was this thing that you just didn’t want. I love that she decided to reinvent it. Because it needed that.

Tosi: It’s very Zoë. She’s a master of savory as much as sweet, so it’s a good expression of her and her style.

Bush: And the size — I often think of a knish as a baseball, and I love that this is smaller and also has the punch of dill.

9. The Honey Cake at Hani’s

As a child in northern Serbia, the chef Miro Uskokovic was often sent to the bakery to buy his mother a slice of her favorite dessert, Russian honey cake, or medovik, composed of thin, alternating layers of honey-flavored cake and sweet sour cream filling. One origin story claims it was created by a chef to impress Elizaveta Alexeyevna, the wife of the 19th-century Russian emperor Alexander I. Uskokovic, however, was never a fan. “My siblings and I were like, ‘Seriously, another honey dessert? Give me chocolate!’” he says. Still, last year, when he and his wife, Shilpa Uskokovic, opened their East Village bakery, Hani’s — named after his mother — Shilpa felt compelled to feature her own spin on the Eastern European classic, based on one she liked at the pastry chef Michelle Polzine’s now-closed 20th Century Cafe in San Francisco, and combining honey-flavored cookies with a honey-caramel sour cream mousse and a light crumb coating. While the cake rests for three days in the fridge, the cookies soften and absorb the mousse, resulting in an airy, tender texture and a rich flavor that even Miro admits he now enjoys. — E.Q.

67 Cooper Square, East Village, Manhattan

Mick: Some people say it’s too dense, but that’s the way a honey cake is supposed to be. It’s not a cake, but actually a cookie that gets layered with a cream filling and then gets soggy. With a cup of tea, it’s perfect.

Tosi: Is there a lens they’re putting it through, or is it that they’re making a really great traditional version?

Mick: I do think his story is unique, being from Serbia and then being the pastry chef of [the iconic American restaurant] Gramercy Tavern for over a decade, and now opening up his own shop.

10. The Pineapple Linzer Cookie at Té Company

In the 1970s, when pineapple cultivation increased throughout Southeast Asia and Taiwanese farmers found themselves with a surplus, bakers in the country turned to a recipe said to have been invented in the central city of Taichung: Taiwanese pineapple cakes. The short-crust pastry rectangles filled with pineapple and winter melon paste are now often eaten during Lunar New Year and at other festive occasions, because the word for pineapple in Taiwanese Hokkien also means “prosperity arrives.” At Té Company, a serene tearoom with two locations in downtown Manhattan (the West Village shop opened in 2015, followed by the East Village outpost in 2024), the husband-and-wife owners Frederico Ribeiro and Elena Liao serve their own take, incorporating elements of the Austrian Linzer cookie. Ribeiro, Té’s chef, squishes jam made from pineapple and a thin layer of yuzu kosho (a fermented condiment made with yuzu zest and chili peppers) between two circles of hazelnut shortbread. A tiny circular cutout on top reveals the sweet yellow filling, which has a spicy tang that’s balanced by the butter crumb. Liao, a native of Taiwan who often travels back to source her tea directly from small farmers, suggests pairing the treat with the shop’s Oriental Beauty, an oxidized oolong variety with notes that complement the cookie. — Wei Tchou

163 West 10th Street, West Village; 314 East 9th Street, East Village, Manhattan

Tran: I’ve eaten a box of six in one sitting. The lime zest on top, the salt …

Tosi: It’s so down to the hundredth of a thousandth of a gram — it’s not too sweet, it’s not too salty. It’s one of the most impeccably considered bites of dessert I’ve had. You can walk right by it and not even know it’s a business, and there’s something about that that feels essential: You just never know in New York City when something’s going to blow you away.

Weller: After I tried it and was wowed by it, some publication printed the recipe and I remember getting really excited and going home and making it. I spun it around and I put it in my first cookbook (attributed to them).

11. The Chocolate Babka at Breads Bakery

When it debuted at the original location of Breads near Union Square in 2013, the chocolate babka — crispy-edged, springy and oozing with a Nutella-and-chocolate filling — was a revelation. Before that, the babka sold in New York was typically faithful to the recipe that Jewish immigrants brought with them when they arrived from Eastern Europe around the turn of the 20th century: a soft, dense loaf of yeasted, enriched dough, often made pareve (classified as neither meat nor dairy under kosher law) by the inclusion of cooking oil instead of butter. The babka at Breads, however, is made from a laminated dough that its co-founder, Uri Scheft, began working with at his first bakery in Tel Aviv. After New York magazine named it the best babka in town in 2013, the bakery — which now has six locations — went from selling about a dozen a day to, during the winter holidays, over a thousand, says co-founder Gadi Peleg. It started a babka renaissance, with scores of other bakers adopting Scheft’s laminated technique. At Breads, the loaf has become so important that Peleg, who, after a split with Scheft, now owns the bakery outright, calls his business “the house that babka built.” — B.C.

Multiple locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn

Weller: It started a trend of babka, and also the trend of laminated doughs being used in different ways.

Tosi: He really defied the odds of how much chocolate one could put in babka.

12. The Laminated Baguette at ALF Bakery

The baker Amadou Ly’s two-year-old shop sits on the subterranean level of Chelsea Market, serving as a shrine to buttery doughs. Rows of glossy Danishes and flaky croissant bread beckon shoppers from glass-front cases, but the real draw is ALF’s laminated baguette: a classic, thin French loaf wrapped in crisp layered dough. Ly learned to make it at TriBeCa’s tiny but revered Arcade Bakery, where he worked under the tutelage of his mentor Roger Gural, Arcade’s owner, for more than four years until the place closed in 2019. Gural found the recipe in “Tours de Main, Pains Spéciaux et Recettes Régionales” by Christian Vabret, a 2002 cookbook of regional French baked goods, though Ly says it’s rarely produced commercially because it requires a multiday process of fermentation and lamination. At ALF, he makes no more than 40 per day (in plain and in seeded varieties); they typically sell out by early afternoon. — E.Q.

Chelsea Market Lower Level, 435 West 15th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan

Mick: I love ALF’s but we all know bread’s not a pastry.

Bush: But is the laminated baguette a pastry? Melissa and I both put it on our lists.

Weller: I have a soft spot for the laminated baguette. Is it a pastry? Not necessarily, but it’s a pastry application applied to bread.

Tosi: I normally always go for a sweet first, but I find his savory stuff incredibly successful. And he’s in the basement of Chelsea Market!

Bush: It feels like Arcade Bakery, which was also in a weird office building.

13. The Black Cake at Allan’s Bakery

Making black cake, which is traditionally served at Christmas and weddings across the English-speaking Caribbean, requires ample planning. Its base of ground prunes, currants, dried cherries and citrus peels is soaked for weeks or even months in rum and wine before being mixed into a spiced, sweetened batter and baked. The ebony-hued cake that emerges from the oven is often as dense in texture as it is in flavor. Allan’s Bakery, a family-run Flatbush, Brooklyn, institution (which recently opened a second location in Lower Manhattan), takes a lighter approach. Christian Smith, who manages the bakery and is also one of the chefs, works off a recipe first conceived by his grandmother Gloria Smith, who was born in Panama to Jamaican parents, and his grandfather, the store’s namesake; the couple opened Allan’s together in 1961. The family prefers a fluffy texture, which the bakery achieves by adjusting the ratio of flour to fruit. Rather than soaking the fruit and nuts in a large plastic drum, as is typical, they use more compact containers, which prevents the alcohol from sinking to the bottom. The result is a cake that’s evenly boozy throughout and dark but not bitter, with top notes of nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon and mace. Happily, Allan’s won’t make you wait till Christmas — their black cake is available year-round. — N.A.

1109 Nostrand Avenue, Flatbush, Brooklyn; 166 Allen Street B, Lower East Side, Manhattan

Mick: My grandmother’s version of black cake was always dense and moist and off limits to children under 8. You can get a little tipsy off it. The Allan’s version is one of those things that will never leave New York.

14. The Corn Husk Meringue at Cosme

In Mexican cuisine, corn husks are well known as wrappers for tamales of all kinds. At the chef Enrique Olvera’s high-end Mexican restaurant Cosme, in the Flatiron district, the ingredient is put to more inventive use: The leaves are dehydrated, blackened over an open flame and crushed into a fine powder that’s added to meringues, giving the desserts a subtly charred flavor reminiscent of Mexican street corn. Piped into three-inch rounds and baked until their crisp surfaces begin to crack, the sweet, gooey-centered domes are split open before being arranged around a mound of charred-vanilla-bean whipped cream and custardy mascarpone sweet-corn mousse. More of the black powder then gets sprinkled on top of the dessert along with a pinch of salt. The dish, which was developed by Cosme’s former chef de cuisine Daniela Soto-Innes, set a new standard for fine-dining desserts after the restaurant opened in 2014, and hasn’t left the menu since. Though perhaps best eaten after a meal of tostadas and carnitas, it can also be ordered on its own at the bar. Last year, when Olvera opened the more casual restaurant Esse Taco in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the only item on the dessert menu was a corn husk meringue sundae, which substitutes La Newyorkina’s Mexican vanilla ice cream for the whipped cream. — M.O.

35 East 21st Street, Flatiron, Manhattan

Tran: I couldn’t not nominate the corn husk meringue. It’s dated now, but when I first had it, I thought, “Oh my God, this is crazy.” And can you get this anywhere else? I don’t think you can.

Mick: I don’t consider it a pastry.

Velez: There’s places all around the world where they sell meringues as pastries. Dry meringues, chewy in the center. It’s not a cake, it’s not an entremet. But it’s a weird line. We’re limiting ourselves, and when I think of pastry, it’s supposed to be limitless. We don’t need to put 12 plated desserts on this list, but if we had two that made sense …

Mick: As pastry chefs, we do a little bit of bread, we do a little bit of pastry, we do a little bit of ice cream. It’s a very broad and wide term.

Tosi: A meringue is a pastry. It’s a baked good, it’s slow and low in the oven.

Mick: And it’s very finicky, too.

Velez: It takes skill to do it.

15. The Sour Cream Glazed Doughnut at Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop

The 72-year-old Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop is a relic of a time before Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood was gentrified. Behind the counter, steam hisses from four pots of Bunn-O-Matic coffee as women in mint green dresses with bubble gum pink collars pack doughnuts (available in roughly five dozen flavors) into white boxes, tying them with string. The current owners, Christos and Donna Siafakas, bought the bakery in 1993. Donna, who grew up a few blocks away, had been a customer since childhood, often stopping in for a snack after seeing a movie. In the early 2000s, Christos wanted to add a tangier flavor to an otherwise sweet menu, so he introduced the sour cream glazed, a cake-style doughnut with a thin layer of icing clinging to its craggy crust. — E.Q.

727 Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Weller: I remember taking my son when he was a toddler and sitting at the counter.

Tran: I like their sour cream. I also love the toasted coconut, but I’m team coconut all the time.

Weller: I like the crunchy parts on the sour cream doughnut.

Bush: They’re also doing interesting new flavors, like a PB&J doughnut. They’re continuing to innovate while also respecting the classics.

16. The Sea Salt Chocolate Chip Cookie at the Pastry Box

More than 80 years after Ruth Wakefield, the proprietor of the Toll House inn in Whitman, Mass., published the first recipe for chocolate chip cookies, American bakers remain obsessed with perfecting them, and at least once a decade, a new iteration sweeps New York. In the late 1990s, there were lines for Levain’s massive, soft-centered version. In the 2010s, people lined up for the French-inspired bakery Maman’s interpretation, filled with macadamia nuts, almonds and walnuts. Tiara Bennett, the chef and owner of the Pastry Box in the East Village, spent six years honing ingredient ratios and testing baking times to come up with the city’s latest favorite: a golden quarter-pound cookie with oversize chocolate chips that’s topped with Maldon salt. To achieve its chewy and crunchy consistency, Bennett — who started her business as a weekend pop-up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood six years ago and debuted her Manhattan storefront in 2023 — uses more dark brown than white sugar and brings down the amount of butter. The chocolate is Callebaut (a mix of dark and milk), and the cookie’s crispy edges are achieved by smashing the dough balls by hand halfway through baking. — W.T.

515 East 12th Street, East Village, Manhattan

Mick: There’s a renaissance of Black-owned spaces in New York, and we’d be remiss not to add Tiara to this list. A chocolate chip cookie is classic. Hers leans more crispy on the outside, ooey-gooey in the middle, which is the only way to have a chocolate chip cookie. But does anybody else have one they want to argue for?

Tosi: You’ll laugh, my chocolate chip cookie nomination was those underbaked ones from the Whole Foods pastry case. That’s what I eat on the go. But this one’s not just a chocolate chip cookie; there’s a real uniqueness to it.

17. The Ensaymada Croissant at Kora

Furloughed from their restaurant industry jobs during the pandemic, Kimberly Camara and Kevin Borja launched their online-only bakery, Kora, in the summer of 2020, after Camara decided on a whim to try frying a batch of brioche dough in their Woodside, Queens, apartment. This past spring, they opened a storefront in nearby Sunnyside that, like its homespun predecessor, serves pastries inspired by Camara’s Filipino roots (especially her late grandmother’s recipes). Though doughnuts remain a focus, one of the most popular items is the ensaymada croissant, a French-inflected interpretation of a pillowy Filipino bread that’s traditionally made from coiled butter-and-egg dough brushed with margarine or butter, sprinkled with sugar and finished with shavings of a salty cheese called queso de bola. Camara instead uses laminated all-butter croissant pastry, which she makes in small batches and ferments for three days before baking it, then coating the result with a butter-sugar mixture and finely microplaned Edam, a semihard Dutch cheese. Sweet, salty, airy and crisp, the pastry pairs well with a drip coffee. — M.O.

45-12 Greenpoint Avenue, Sunnyside, Queens

Bush: I nominated their flan doughnut. It’s an amazing example of a Frankensteined pastry, which is something that’s happening so widely in New York City and beyond. One of the problems I find with hybrid pastries is that you’re left feeling like you didn’t get the best of any of the pastries that are constituting the whole. But that one hits every note.

Mick: I put the ensaymada croissant. I clearly have a thing for cheese and sweetness. But it also speaks to that American blend of cultures.

Bush: Yeah, it’s a reinvention of a traditional French form.

18. The Banana Cream Pie at Pies ’n’ Thighs

Working as a cake decorator at Magnolia Bakery in the early 2000s, the pastry chef Sarah Sanneh was part of the West Village institution just after it became a national phenomenon thanks to its appearance on “Sex and the City.” Banana pudding, its signature non-cake offering, would eventually account for almost one-third of Magnolia’s sales. It’s no surprise, then, that in 2010, when Sanneh opened a permanent location of Pies ’n’ Thighs, the Williamsburg restaurant she’d begun as a pop-up four years earlier, she introduced a banana cream pie. To make it, she layers silky, barely set banana custard (with a squeeze of lemon for brightness) and fresh bananas in a crust made with crushed Nilla Wafers rather than the traditional graham crackers. Still a favorite at the Southern-style restaurant after 15 years, the dessert is topped with a cloud of whipped cream, a grating of nutmeg and a couple of extra wafers. — L.F.

166 South Fourth Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Weller: I was thinking about the banana pudding at Magnolia, but I had it recently and it was awful. I love everything about Pies ’n’ Thighs, so I thought this was a good idea.

Tosi: They take it really seriously, and they almost don’t have to, because they could get away with not.

19. The Fancy Dessert at Superiority Burger

Brooks Headley has always considered cake with ice cream to be the ideal dessert — “and hot cake with ice cream is even better,” he says. In the 2010s, when he was the executive pastry chef at the Italian fine-dining restaurant Del Posto, he says other pastry chefs saw the pairing as pedestrian. When he opened the first iteration of the East Village vegetarian restaurant Superiority Burger in 2015, he was finally free to serve what he calls “Fancy Dessert.” The flavors change depending on the farmer’s market ingredients chosen by the pastry chef Katie Toles, whose recent creations have included a shiso cake with jasmine-rice sauce, coconut gelato, crispy rice and mango chunks and a vanilla cake infused with black tea, which was topped with peaches, wafer cookies inlaid with fig leaves and a drizzle of fig leaf caramel. But there are a few constants: The cake is always vegan — its fluffiness is achieved through the addition of vinegar and baking soda, which react (“like a science fair volcano,” says Headley) to create loft, and features olive oil instead of butter. After being baked, it’s sliced and griddled hot to order, then plated with vegan gelato, a sauce of some kind and something crunchy. — W.T.

119 Avenue A, East Village, Manhattan

Bush: Can I bring up a thought about ice cream? I’m wondering if it’s wrong that we’re omitting the Superiority Burger gelato or the Thai Diner sundae, or —

Velez: Soft serve.

Bush: Yeah, soft serve is so New York.

Tosi: But it’s not a pastry.

Bush: They also griddle a lot of cakes there. …

Velez: And the fact that [the cakes and ice cream] are seasonal: the [Fancy Dessert] showcases quality and imagination.

20. The Beef Patty from Pop’s Patties

Beef patties — flaky, golden Caribbean pastries stuffed with spiced chopped meat — have been a ubiquitous New York snack since the late 1960s and the 1970s, when a new wave of immigrants from Jamaica began selling them at Brooklyn’s restaurants and bakeries as well as from street carts. Before long, they could be found at pizzerias and bodegas citywide. But when the chef Shirwin Burrowes launched Pop’s Patties in January 2023 — partnering with Daniel Eddy, the owner of the Park Slope restaurant, bakery and butcher shop Winner — he wanted to offer a new take. Burrowes, who was born in Barbados and raised mostly in the Bronx, spent nearly 20 years working in fine-dining kitchens before he turned to full-time patty-making. He stuffs his all-butter crust with grass-fed, locally farmed ground beef that’s been cooked without the typical oils and fillers, which can result in a pasty texture. The richness of the dish is counterbalanced by the kick of the seasoning, which is a traditional Bajan blend of scotch bonnet pepper, thyme, garlic and scallions. In addition to being sold at the three locations of Winner, they’re now available at Barclays Center during Nets and Liberty games. — N.A.

At Winner Bakery, 367 Seventh Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn; Winner Butcher at 192 Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn; Winner in the Park, in Prospect Park; and Barclays Center, 620 Atlantic Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

Mick: I think having a beef patty on this list is important. You get them at bodegas, and it’s one of those pastries that’s been entwined into New York culture from the Caribbean.

Velez: I grew up in New York, and anyone that’s grown up in New York has had a beef patty.

Mick: Shirwin’s is just such a good one.

21. The Baked Roast Pork Bun at Mei Lai Wah Bakery

After immigrating to New York from Taishan, in China’s Guangdong province, in the 1940s, Ben Chen’s grandfather missed the taste of char siu bao, or roast pork buns made of wheat flour dough glazed with simple syrup and filled with chunks of pork shoulder in a sweet-salty combination of hoisin, oyster and soy sauces. When he opened Mei Lai Wah Bakery on Bayard Street in Chinatown in 1968, he served the dim sum staple in its most fully realized form: glinting, golden brown and bursting with meat. Ben took over the family business in 2020 and, in recent years, after the place became popular on TikTok, the ever-present line has grown longer. To meet demand, Mei Lai Wah relocated this past July to a bigger location on Mott Street with more ovens. Go to the A.T.M. beforehand, as customers with cash can head straight to the register to order, rather than wait in line for the electronic kiosk. — J.C.

41 Mott Street, Chinatown, Manhattan

Tran: If we’re talking about meat-filled pastries, we have to have a pork bun from Chinatown. When I first moved here, I wanted to try every single pork bun. And there are a lot of really bad ones. But this place is an institution. They do a good job with the meat-to-dough ratio. The meat is flavorful and they don’t skimp on it. And the price point — $2.50 — you can’t beat.

Tosi: I put my favorite custard bun [from Chinatown’s Golden Steamer] — I just thought there had to be a bun on this list, but I’m down for going savory with the filling instead of sweet.

22. The Guava and Cheese Fan-Fan at Fan-Fan Doughnuts

Guava and cheese is a familiar pairing throughout Latin America, with the sweet and floral fruit complementing creamy dairy in dishes like Cuban pastelitos (puff pastries filled with guava paste and cream cheese) and Brazilian Romeo and Juliets (slices of fresh cow’s milk cheese topped with guava paste). The Mexican Jewish chef Fany Gerson’s guava and cheese doughnut, which has been on the menu at her bakery, Fan-Fan Doughnuts, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood since it opened five years ago — was inspired by the guava cheese roll from one of her favorite Mexico City bakeries, Panadería Rosetta. To make them, Gerson — who was previously a co-owner and the pastry chef at the New York doughnut chain Dough and launched the Mexican frozen treat brand La Newyorkina — coats the éclair-shaped pastries in guava glaze, fills them with a lightly sweetened mixture featuring cream cheese from Saxelby Cheesemongers in Chelsea Market and tops them with a brown butter and walnut cookie crumble. The result — which she calls a fan-fan, after her own nickname — is tart, crunchy and smooth. — J.C.

448 Lafayette Avenue, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

Tosi: She’s done everything from doughnuts at Dough to paletas [fruity Popsicles] with La Newyorkina, and she does a few other cookies, but her fried pastries are what I crave.

23. The Lemon Meringue Pie at 4 Charles Prime Rib

Lemon meringue pie is an American innovation with European roots: Recipes for meringue-topped tarts had begun to proliferate by at least the 19th century in France, while lemon curd was popular in Victorian England. Elizabeth Goodfellow, a 19th-century pastry chef in Philadelphia, is credited with popularizing the combination of the two in the United States, creating a sweet, citrusy dessert that’s now found everywhere from diners to fine-dining restaurants. Arguably the best — and almost certainly the most Instagrammed — lemon meringue pie in New York is at 4 Charles Prime Rib, a West Village steakhouse that opened in 2016. The graham cracker crust is buttery and crisp, the curd tart and custardy, but the most striking part is the meringue, which towers seven inches above the filling. When 4 Charles debuted, it was walk-in only; reservations are now required and, with only nine tables inside, almost impossible to get. But you don’t need one to try the pie. It’s also available at Midtown’s Monkey Bar, which is owned by the same restaurant group. — W.T.

4 Charles Street, West Village, Manhattan

Mick: It’s a slice of something extravagant that’s so classic in those New York steakhouses. Delmonico’s has the baked Alaska, 4 Charles has the pie. They’re so luscious and abundant, very old-school New York.

Tosi: And it feels like you’re in someone’s wood-lined den or study.

24. The Vanilla Concha at Masa Madre

In 18th-century Mexico, during the Spanish colonial period, chefs and bakers were influenced by French cuisine. One result was the concha: a soft, brioche-like bun with a sugary, seashell-patterned crust. While the pastry remains a beloved breakfast staple throughout Mexico, those found in New York have often been underwhelming, mass produced and sold as little more than fillers at the city’s panaderías. That changed last year, however, when the Mexico City-born baker José Luis Flores opened Masa Madre in Woodside, Queens, where, he says, “we’re making conchas the old way.” To Flores, who was previously the pastry chef at the Union Square restaurant Patria, that means fermenting his dough for nearly two days using a five-year-old sourdough starter he’s named “bodoquito” (“baby”), resulting in a pastry that’s tangier and more fragrant than those made from commercial yeast. Topped with a mixture of high-fat butter, flour and sugar before going into the oven, his conchas emerge with a latte-colored crust and a moist, dense crumb. — L.F.

47-55 46th Street, Woodside, Queens

Bush: It’s utterly airy and not too sweet. Sort of the Platonic ideal.

Weller: It’s been on my list of pastries to try.

25. The Cheesecake at Agi’s Counter

When the chef Jeremy Salamon launched dinner service at his Jewish Hungarian restaurant Agi’s Counter in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights in 2022, cheesecake was the only dessert on the menu. A riff on the dense, creamy New York style often credited to Arnold Reuben, who made it a century ago at his Jewish diner, Reuben’s Restaurant in Midtown, and later popularized at diners like Junior’s, which first opened in 1950 in Downtown Brooklyn, Salamon’s version is a thick wedge made with Philadelphia cream cheese on a crushed graham cracker crust. But he serves it with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, a sprinkle of Maldon sea salt and a wedge of lemon, which cuts the richness. Owing to demand, the cheesecake is now also on the weekend brunch menu, and Salamon serves a blueberry and coriander compote on top. Like many of the chef’s creations (such as chicken liver mousse on potato Pullman bread), the cake is a well-executed take on a classic that’s far lighter than it sounds. — J.C.

818 Franklin Avenue, Crown Heights, Brooklyn

Tran: It was like $18, and I was there for lunch, so the dessert was actually the most expensive part. I thought, “Oh, bold.” And then I was blown away.


Production: Ian William Bauman. Photo assistant: Mimi d’Autremont

Ella Riley-Adams is the senior social media editor of T Magazine.

Nicole Acheampong is the digital editor of T Magazine.

The post The 25 Essential Pastries to Eat in New York City appeared first on New York Times.

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