Pretty much the only thing that I knew I wanted to do in New York was to visit Momofuku Milk Bar and have a slice of crack pie and/or a compost cookie. Who am I kidding? There was never any 'or' about it.
We went to the mid-town branch, tucked inside the entrance to Ma Peche on 56th Street. Even if you know it's there, you can walk past it a couple of times before you realise where you are. Inside is dark, there's a counter and a couple of shelves stacked with cookies and merchandise. There's not really anywhere to sit down and eat (hence the bonus pictures of our rather minimalist but very comfortable hotel room).
I had a piece of crack pie. It is mainly made of sugar as far as I can tell and almost impossible to describe. The base is a little like a thin and chewy (English) flapjack but the filling...well, the filling is sticky and gooey and sweet and all kinds of wonderful. Definitely not an every day (or every week) treat though...
Boyfriend had a slice of grasshopper pie which he said was good but probably not good enough for him to justify walking 16 blocks there and back (in my defence, he bought some trousers too on the way there so it wasn't like we walked all that way just to buy pie).
I also bought a selection of cookies, some of which even made it to LA with us. Boyfriend's favourite was the blueberry and cream cookie (which he said was good enough to walk 16 blocks for, sadly by the time he tried it, we were in LA so it would have been a considerably longer walk for another). I did enjoy my compost cookie (and the others that I sampled) but I felt like all of the elements could have been more pronounced. When you advertise a cookie has having pretzels, crisps, coffee grounds, butterscotch, chocolate and whatever else is in there, I want to be able to taste them. The real non-crack pie winner for me was the birthday cake truffles, three of which I hoovered down in a matter of seconds one night despite having just consumed my body weight in pulled pork sliders.
We're back in New York for one night at the end of our trip. We haven't booked a hotel room yet. My boyfriend wants to stay somewhere close to Central Park so he can go for a run. I think I can probably arrange it so we're staying somewhere close to the Milk Bar so I can do my own kind of work out.