You never forget your first time. Mine was across the street from a police precinct in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, where several years ago the smell of buttery, laminated pastry lifted me off my feet and right up to the counter of Little Miss Muffin ‘N’ Her Stuffin. At that exact moment, a batch of Caribbean patties appeared, fresh from the oven and freighted with seasoned ground beef. I ordered one, setting the rest of my life into motion.
As far as I’m concerned, the Caribbean patty is as New York as pastrami on rye. Since the Jamaican food manufacturer Tower Isles popularized them in the 1970s, flaky, filled patties have become a fixture of slice shops, bodegas and high school cafeterias. Recently, I’ve been interested in the ones coming from restaurant kitchens, which range from the simple but divine — those highlighted here — to the eye opening, like the $18 puff pastry patty, with foie gras, I crunched into at Bar Kabawa.
A smorgasbord of patties in Prospect Park
At Tosh’s Patties, the chef Tosh Chareton seasons his patty dough with turmeric and curry powder and then runs it through a sheeter with layers of high-fat butter. After two days, the dough is stuffed, folded and baked, the patties emerging from the oven looking a bit like croissants.
Amazingly, Mr. Chareton learned to make patties watching YouTube. In fall 2023, he left his job as a bartender at Sake No Hana, run by Tao Group Hospitality, and began testing recipes from an unlicensed bootleg stand in public parks. By the time I found him this summer, he and his partners had secured a stall at Smorgasburg in Prospect Park, where they sell patties on weekends in flavors like jerk mushroom and curry chicken. The crust I love is the result of Mr. Chareton’s background — his parents are Jamaican and French — but his business partner, Daniel Park, is the reason for my favorite patty: kimchi and Korean pork belly, a recipe from Mr. Park’s mother.
Smorgasburg Prospect Park (Breeze Hill), near Flatbush
Bonjou Brooklyn
Since June, I’ve tried (and failed) to find the time to visit Bon Pâtés, a patty shop in East Flatbush. Then one day fate put it right in my path. I was on my way to meet a friend in Prospect Park when I spotted the owner, Edgina Desormeau, ladling soursop limeade into a plastic cup under a tent outside the Brooklyn Museum. You can guess what we had for lunch.
I recognized Ms. Desormeau because she used to run Bonbon Lakay, one of my favorite places for Haitian patties until it closed in 2023. Is it possible her patties improved? As before, they’re made in the Haitian style, the puff pastry baked into brittle layers that would probably shatter if you looked at them wrong. But the beef filling is better than ever, heavily seasoned with Haitian epis, a bracing marinade made from Scotch bonnet peppers and scallion. The patties sold outside the Brooklyn Museum on Sundays are hauled over from East Flatbush, but that’s never stopped me from wolfing one down. The only proof they ever existed will be the flakes on your shorts.
1140 Utica Avenue (Clarendon Road), East Flatbush
The king of the chain patties
My bar for mass-produced patties was set by chains like Golden Krust and Tower Isles. So my expectations were fairly low when Juici Patties, a restaurant chain from Jamaica, opened in Bed-Stuy this spring.
Holy air ball. Now sold from three more locations in the city — two in the Bronx and one in Queens — the patties here are better than your average: baked to a crisp, Cheez-It orange and brimming with spinach, chicken and spicy or mild beef. Real patty heads know this, but the best way to eat one is in sandwich form, wedged into a puffy pocket of coco bread that’s hot enough to burn your hand. Of course, there are reminders that this is a chain, like when the crimped edges of a patty come out hardtack-tough, suggesting they were once frozen, or when you take a closer look at the curry chicken and realize it looks exactly like split pea soup. But the more I stop by Juici Patties, the more I view those drawbacks as the cost of convenience. A new patty chain is upon us.
1293 Fulton Street (Nostrand Avenue), Bed-Stuy, multiple locations
From readers like you
Last May we called on our readers to “embrace the hot restaurant dupe,” arguing that there is an accessible alternative for “almost every high-end, impossible-to-get-into, give-up-your-firstborn-for-a-reservation restaurant.” We’d like to revisit this idea by helping you all find dupes for beloved restaurants that are no longer around. Email us at [email protected] or use this form to send your submission; please include the name of the original restaurant and what you loved the most about it. Thanks for reading and see you on Tuesday.
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