Introduction
Cereal Milk for the Gods
Walk by Momofuku Milk Bar in New York’s East Village any day or evening, and you’re likely to find a small horde. Foodies, hipsters, and students come for a fix of chef David Chang’s addictive pork buns and the whimsical confections of his protégé, Christina Tosi, like the crack pie (described simply as “toasted oat crust, gooey butter filling”) and the compost cookie (pretzels, potato chips, coffee, oats, and butterscotch and chocolate chips), which manages to satisfy all of your snack food cravings in one chewy, crunchy, salty bite. But the real draw is the soft-serve ice cream, piled in generous, creamy spirals that threaten to topple their little paper cups. Tosi dreams up a constantly changing lineup of out-there flavors, from old-fashioned doughnut to the signature cereal milk, which, as advertised, tastes like a luscious version of the milk left in the bowl after you’ve finished your cornflakes.
But then, that’s exactly the sort of thing helped establish Chang’s reputation as the irreverent maestro of the budding Momofuku empire, which has grown from a single noodle bar in 2004 to five unique but equally worshiped temples of dining. Their casual atmosphere belies the meticulous detail that goes into Chang’s food and the insistence on the best, locally sourced ingredients. So who do Chang and Tosi entrust for their soft serve? The answer is proudly scrawled on the chalkboard menu: All dairy is organic and comes from Milk Thistle Farm, ...
