New York Magazine – July 22, 2019

56 new york | july 22–august 4, 2019

if there’s anything in this world you can count

on, it’s a Levain Bakery chocolate-chip-walnut cookie.

They’re unfailingly fresh (in fact, they’re often too hot

to eat), and they’re always satisfying, almost absurdly so. The

six-ounce, two-inch-tall dynamos were introduced at the origi-

nal Levain Upper West Side cubbyhole on 74th Street in 1996,

and it’s not too much to say that, over the years, they’ve rede-

fined the idea of what a chocolate-chip cookie is or could be:

not flat and smooth, but tall and craggy with jagged, crisp-

edged peaks; not soft and gooey in the middle, but supremely

soft and gooey in the middle; not a snack but a meal. One

cookie could feed a small platoon of Augustus Gloops. Among

local cookie fiends, they’re considered as much a New York culi-

nary icon as a Nathan’s hot dog or a Di Fara slice. Tourists

bucket-list them. New Yorkers line up for them. And, according

to Levain co-owners Pam Weekes and Connie McDonald, Jews

even bring them to Passover seders—hametz or no hametz.

Yet outside of New York, Levain Bakery is not a household

name. That could change. After an infusion of capital from

private-equity firm Stripes Group, which has backed brands

like Blue Apron and GrubHub/Seamless, and the appoint-

ment of a CEO who last helmed David Chang’s delivery start-

up Ando, Weekes and McDonald are preparing to stake their

claim to the national cookie consciousness, beginning with

the opening of their first Upper East Side outpost (1484

Third Ave., nr. 84th St.). A Noho branch will debut this fall, in

the old M&D Shapiro hardware-store space on Bleecker and

Lafayette, with national expansion likely to follow in 2020

with Boston, D.C., and Chicago under consideration.

The Levain story is of the classic career-changing-boot-

strap variety: Two friends meet through a shared hobby

(competitive swimming), commiserate about job dissatisfac-

tion (investment banking and fashion), begin a wholesale

bread-baking operation in the back of a Greenwich Village

restaurant (Vince and Linda at One Fifth, whose chef at the

time was Anthony Bourdain), and open their own retail shop

(in a tiny brownstone basement on the Upper West Side). It

was there, during the slow early days, that out of boredom

McDonald baked a batch of the monster cookies she and

Weekes ate while training for triathlons. (Apparently, neither

triathlete had heard of Clif Bars, rice cakes, hemp seeds, or

the general concept of sports nutrition.)

The cookies were a minor success that became a major sen-

sation a year later. “Pam was in the back, and I was mopping

the floor,” says McDonald. “I picked up the phone and this

woman said, ‘Hi, I’m Amanda Hesser from the New York

Times,’ and I was about to hang up because I didn’t know who

she was. I thought she was trying to sell me a subscription. And

she was like, ‘I write the “Temptations” column for the New

York Times, and we’re featuring you tomorrow and I’m fact-

checking.’ ” The rest, as they say, is history, in the form of stag-

gering lines and three more branches, including a Harlem

commissary kitchen and a place out in Wainscott, where the

cookie bakers followed their summering clientele.

So why the urge to scale up after more than two decades of

slow but steady, sustainable growth? “It’s hard to keep good

people who couldn’t see a future for themselves because we

weren’t growing fast enough,” says Weekes. And then there are

the copycats. You might have noticed that Levain’s aren’t the

only bocce-ball-size cookies oozing all over the internet these

days. Despite their best efforts to guard their intellectual

property—turning down cookbook offers, enforcing NDAs—

the co-owners realized they had to fight fire with fire, or at

least cookie dough with cookie dough (their four flavors of

cookies account for 85 percent of their total revenue). Though

they won’t share sales figures, when pestered sufficiently they

will offer that in 2018 they sold enough cookies that, “stacked

on top of each other, they’d make up something like 689 foot-

ball fields!” As if to say, “You do the math!” Well, okay. Con-

sidering that a typical Levain cookie ranges from one and a

half to two inches tall, that adds up to 1.2 to 1.6 million cookies

per year. And climbing. r.r. & r.p.

Photograph by Joe Lingeman

PHOTOGRAPH: SCOTT HEINS FOR NEW YORK MAGAZINE (EDIE JO’S)

food/openings

empire building

Big Cookie, Bigger Stage

Levain Bakery bulks up.

D

oug friedman is

a film-industry fugitive

from Los Angeles who

learned the ropes of the

restaurant business working

virtually every job at

his brother Ken Friedman’s

restaurant group, from

food running to construction,

then left in 2014 before

accusations of sexual

harassment fractured the

empire. For his first solo

project, he has joined with

fellow industry veteran

Ben Toro to open an

emphatically neighborhood

joint in Toro’s own Prospect–

Lefferts Gardens backyard.

Edie Jo’s, a combination

of the partners’ daughters’

names, occupies a newly

developed corner that fronts

the Parkline apartment

tower and adjoins an

independent bookstore and

a preschool. When all those

renters, readers, and toddlers

get hungry, they can head

next door for chef Jonathan

Short’s nostalgia-laced,

locally sourced takes on

homey American food: grass-

fed cheeseburgers, a Denver

roast with potato gratin and

green beans, pork-shoulder

steak with buttermilk

kimchee (a lacto-fermented

approach to coleslaw). Short

cites influences from Betty

Crocker and TV dinners

to the corner bodega,

and once the hours expand,

he’ll add daytime items

like a breakfast sandwich,

a cheesesteak, and

a vegan muffuletta.

r.r. & r.p.

Edie Jo’s

630 Flatbush Ave., at Fenimore St.,

Prospect–Lefferts Gardens; 914-229-3300