Momofuku Milk Bar at first glance
All the cool kids had gone already and reported back with their stories. Blondie and Brownie reported of a line that was over an hour. Nick from Beef Aficionado eloquently described his experience at Momofuku Milk Bar. There was much buzz surrounding the new Milk Bar that opened this past weekend. Located adjacent to the Ssam bar on 13th street, Momofuku Milk Bar proved that people still cannot get enough. The latest creation of the David Chang’s Momofuku empire was worth all the hype.
Two items really caught my attention, and those were the compost cookie and the pistachio cake. Early word on the street by Ed Levine was that the compost cookie was a high concept creation that didn’t really deliver. He preferred the peanut butter cookie. Blondie wrote that the peanut butter left a weird after taste and that the compost cookie was better.
I only got the compost cookie so couldn’t tell you if the peanut butter was as good. But if you can only get one cookie, the compost cookie at Momofuku Milk Bar is a good choice. At $1.75, it’s a decently sized cookie for a fair price.
Sometimes when you go to upscale bakeries, you run into the trouble of not getting your money’s worth. I know the food writer Phil Vettel of the Chicago Tribunes thinks it’s an empty phrase to say something like, “you really don’t get much for what you spend.” But Phil is a fucking moron and is out of touch with people who spend their own money on food. Get a clue Phil, and unplug your head out of your ass. Oh shit, yea I said it. Moving on.
The compost cookie has butterscotch chips, chocolate chips, pretzels, and potato chips. It makes it a really dense cookie and weirdly enough all the components work out. I couldn’t really taste the pretzel and the potato chip part but the butterscotch and the chocolate chips were definitely in play.
The pistachio cake was not as successful of a dessert for my tastes. A slice of the pistachio cake features three layers of pistachio cake along with two layers of lemon curd or something like it. The top layer was a pistachio cream and there were some of these crunchy white stuff that I couldn’t figure out. But who am I kidding, my taste buds are lame.
Lemon, almond, and pistachio are the three dominating flavors in the Momofuku Milk Bar pistachio cake. The domination comes in that order. It’s like creating a fantasy basketball team called the Ramon Sessons and KG is actually your best player. That’s all fine and dandy because everyone loves KG and lemons, but if it’s a pistachio cake I just kind of expected more Ramon Sessions. Wow, that made no sense. It’s ok.
I think if your like a citriusy flavor to accompany your cakes, you would love the pistachio cake. I would probably get it again in the future. There are also other cakes in the Milk Bar that look super interesting like the Dulce de Leche cake or the Chocolate chips cake.
As of now, if you look at the Momofuku bakery bio page, you’ll see a lil blurb about Christina Tosi and Marian Mar. It reads: “christina tosi and marian mar are both graduates of the french culinary institute. they are bouley alums who met at the tompkin’s square dog park. they are aspiring diabetic old ladies who wear matching sweat suits. shout out to wd-50.” Definitely shout out to wd~50 because you know who was in line on Sunday at 3pm? None other than the head chef of wd~50, Wylie Dufresne.
I wanted to take the camera out and snap a picture of him in the bakery because that’s like a surefire way to get linked on Eater or something. I want to say that the reason I refrained was due to respect of his privacy, but it was probably because there were 20 people behind me in line and it would have looked weird to bust out a camera to take a picture of a chef enjoying his day off.
There’s no seating at Momofuku Milk Bar, just high counter type of tables for you to stand and eat at the same time. The tables are free of clutter as people take after themselves and clean up. I saw someone clean up his clutter, and them proceed to use his hand as a towel, gathered up all the crumbs in his area, and then put that away in the trash. That seemed above and beyond to me, and I never would have thought of it. So my question is, when you go eat at a place where the unspoken rule is to clean up after yourself, how often do you take care of the crumbs?
Posted by Danny on November 17, 2008 at 8:45 pm
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