And the gold goes to… the French guy

The difference between most chocolate chips and 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. Jacques uses his own over-sized in-house dark chocolate discs rather than the puny chips most gourmet cookies contain.

Big chocolate disks used in Jacques Torres cookies

When you order a cookie from his Dumbo, Upper West Side or Soho stores you can choose from crispy and well done to chewy and more raw.  Even the least well-done cookie is cooked more than a Levain and is much smoother in texture.  They even have a giant steel hot plate to keep cookies warm all day.

There are also no granular sugar crystals or shiny pockets of wet butter, hallmarks of the Levain cookie. While fans of Levain will say Jacques cookies have too much chocolate my vote goes for the French guy because I love the copious amounts of dark chocolate he uses and I like my cookies baked until dark brown.

Visit the Jacques Torres website here. He now has stores in DUMBO, SOHO, Chelsea Market and on the Upper West Side.  He also has an outpost in Harrah’s in Las vegas.

Recommended: Chocolate chip cookies (you can request you preferred crispiness), hot chocolate, both frozen and hot.

If you happen to be walking home late at night on the Upper West Side and if you also happen to have a bag of Levain Cookies with you and if you also happen to get mugged, you could easily knock someone unconscious with the bag. Is this a good thing? Yes.

Is this the best chocolate chip cookie in New York? Many think so. In terms of sheer butter-per-square-inch and pure heft the Levain cookie has no equal. But this is New York city, not a convenience store (yet).  We don’t meaure things by size alone. What about flavor, texture, chocolate quality?

While I am sure there are many small bakeries that have great chocolate chip cookies, there are really only three destination shops for the hard-core chocolate chip cookie lover: City Bakery, Jacques Torres and Levain Bakery. I am going to leave out Max Headroom for now.

The Levain cookie experience:

Compared to City Bakery or Jacques, the Levain cookies most resemble fresh, homemade Toll House cookies. On steroids. With twice the butter. When you visit, the staff will always ask you if you plan to eat the cookie right away and then offer you one hot out of the oven or from the cooling racks. This is the only way to sample one of their cookies and understand what the fuss is about.

The outside of the cookie is brown and slightly crisp, while the inside is (somehow) undercooked but not doughy. Bites from the outside of the cookie are distincly different from the interior. There is so much butter and chocolate flavor packed into this cookie that it appears to break the laws of physics. If you eat an entire cookie in one sitting, don’t plan on eating anything for a few hours. Or days.

The Levain cookies are superbly fresh and right out of the oven they will satisfy any chocolate chip cookie lover, but cold they are really no different than a Nestle Toll House from home. The Torres cookie for example uses sumptuous oversized discs of his famous dark chcolate, and they bake their cookies in a range, from very brown to undercooked, to satisfy a variety of customers’ tastes.

Visit Levain Bakery here.