• Má Pêche

  15 W. 56th St., nr. Fifth Ave.; no phone

  It’s generally agreed that even a bad chocolate-chip cookie wolfed down fresh from the oven in defiance of the cooling rack and juggled between bites like a hot potato is better than a technically superior chocolate-chip cookie that’s been sitting around for even just a couple hours. (This is why otherwise-unassuming home bakers and small, annoying children consider their handiwork in the hypercompetitive field more accomplished than, say, Jacques Torres’s.) The trick, then, is to find a truly talented cookie-maker willing to keep her public awash in cookies that are uncompromisingly hot and fresh, and this is where Momofuku Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi comes in. Tosi makes her cookie dough downtown at Milk Bar and lugs it over to Momo’s midtown hotel-restaurant project, Má Pêche, where each cookie order is baked à la minute and served on the mezzanine with a glass of ice-cold milk. What makes them the best? According to Tosi, it’s good butter (Plugrá), lots of mini Callebaut chocolate chips (so you get plenty of chocolate in every bite), “shitty” vanilla extract (just trust her on this), and an advanced aeration technique. Right, that and—like we said—the fact that they dole them straight out of the freaking oven. It’s the next best thing to winning Christina Tosi in a celebrity-chef auction and having her come to your house and bake the things herself.

From the 2010 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine