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Celebrate National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day With The City's Best
By
Jen Carlson
Published May 15, 2012
Modified May 15, 2012
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By
Jen Carlson
Published May 15, 2012
Modified May 15, 2012
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It's National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, so it is your duty to indulge at least once today. Did you know the chocolate chip cookie wasn't even invented until 1930? Ruth Graves Wakefield owned The Toll House Inn in Massachusetts and... you can pretty much guess what happened next.
But let's flash forward to present day, where chocolate chip cookies can be found everywhere. Fun fact: if you Google "best chocolate chip cookies NYC" the first thing that comes up is the address of Levain Bakery on West 74th Street. Our own Jen Chung has been to the legendary bakery, and tells us the cookies live up to the hype: "They're thick, so sometimes nearly raw inside, really dense," and the size of one's hand!
Pro tips for checking out Levain: The bakery is small, so often you'll find a line out the door, but during your wait you can run in place and try to burn off some of the calories you're about to consume! If you can't wait (or are allergic to nuts, which Levain's have), head over to West 70th Street to Soutine Bakery, where they serve up bags of chocolate chip cookies that are crisp and slightly salty for a really savory sweet taste.
Over in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood you'll find Almondine. An article on NYMag once mouthwateringly described their chocolate chip offerings as "fabulously chewy, moderately gooey, and absolutely delicious, with pools of sweet milk chocolate and a buttery, caramel finish."
Jacques Torres obviously can't be ignored when it comes to chocolate-anything, so you'll do pretty well if you stop by one of their locations (66 Water St, Brooklyn and 350 Hudson St, Manhattan) for a melty, chewy mess of dough and chips. You can also attempt to make them at home, but they won't be as good... as DessertBuzz once declared, "The difference between most chocolate chips and the chips Jacques Torress uses is like the difference between coffee and cocaine. The chips are stronger, more addictive and not easily found in supermarkets."
If you aren't going for fresh-baked, you can't go wrong with Entemann's! Feel free to challenge us on that, but as far as store-bought chocolate chip cookies go, they are the best you'll find.
As for us, we're waiting for the Fairy Cookie Person to show up:
Tagged
chocolate chip cookies
cookies
national chocolate chip cookie day
Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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