[article] [nyc #2] Which is it today - cookies or Cossack squats?

A long-pending update on what I've been up to.

It’s one thing to be excited about a new venture, such as moving to a new city, but it's altogether a different experience when the ingredients of the city become a way of life. I am not the starry-eyed new girl in the city anymore. However, that seems to have not done much in terms of calming my perpetual drive to do something. Anything. Everything. This kind of energy seems to bode well with the vibe of the city, and it’s been a couple of years of me leveraging the unending fabric of the city, sequined with things to do, to feed the ever-hungry tailor in me. 

It’s spring here. People are expressing themselves by dressing in colors that I thought (and maybe even hoped) I would only ever see on one of those red-green-blue color pickers on my monitor. Only to discover later in the day that the temperature has briskly fallen by many degrees and the colors need to be scooped up under a neutral-hued jacket. As for me, as much as picking an outfit is a mind-numbing decision to make, there’s another key decision that I have had to repeatedly make each month in order to adhere to my 2025 New Year’s resolution — where do I get my cookie of the month from? I have never been one to make New Year’s resolutions, but I ran into this deranged idea in the depths of Reddit that you could commit to a resolution that is not actually hard to accomplish — and this idea became the origin story of a cookie-per-month mission. Which, not too surprisingly, is furtively starting to accelerate into cookie-per-fortnight territory, only slowed down by the utter dearth of time (or possibly, time management skills on my part — but tomayto tomahto, right?). How is one supposed to work eight hours a day, dance thrice a week, go to writing classes, keep up friendships, eat healthy, and — the non-negotiable most time-consuming monster of them all — squeeze in a workout? Why am I doing so many things, you ask? The hobby maniac in me shrugs at the question.

The last two years feel more like two months. A lot went down at work. A lot went down in life. At the end of last year, I experienced an episode of delightful chaos that left me thoughtful. It involved a group of us performing a Bharatanatyam piece at an emerging dancers’ showcase, choreographed by my talented friend. Overburdened bobby pins shooting out of humongous hair buns. Smears of the red dye used to decorate the hands and feet turning up at all godforsaken places. The blended fragrance of silk and makeup. The clanking of the hefty anklets. And the sense of nervous anxiety mixed in with childlike excitement in the green room. I remember the hours before and after the performance more clearly than the dance piece itself. Before, it was a sense of panic at the impending affair and plain awe at the other dance pieces before ours. After, it was a burning sentiment that spelled ‘I want more of this.’ Since then, I have begun to take dance, and by extension, fitness, more seriously — once again empowered by the city’s essence, manifesting itself in the presence of a Pilates studio at every street corner.

Back to the cookie talk. Although I’ve structured my ‘grab a friend (or not) and a cookie’ runs this year as a comparative cookie rating project, I think of it more as an experiment to establish whether there exists a chocolate chip cookie that outperforms Levain’s. Crispy as a chip on the outside, gooey as porridge on the inside, with just the right amount of sweetness and the slow rush of flavors for that rare tongue orgasm. There’s Chip City and Crumble, both chains, although the former beats the latter by a wide margin. Chip City seems to possess the complexity of flavors that Levain does, but it loses out in terms of texture, a uniformly chewy texture that is more becoming of a brownie than a cookie — as my cookie-mate of the day wisely declared. Crumbl is a disappointment, with its hard-as-steel exterior, doughy interior, and a generic flavor that reminded me of Chips Ahoy! Admittedly, the idea of a cookie chain that is open late at night is more appealing than Crumbl is given credit for.

At Gooey on the Inside.
Their cookies are so huge you probably just want to
break one in half for each hand.

My April cookie was from Gooey on the Inside. True to its name, the cookie was indeed gooey on the inside. And crispy on the outside too — similar to Levain’s. But unfortunately, it did not succeed in landing that ‘smack’ of tasteful piquancy to the palate. The flavor was too basic. As of today, Chip City stands as the closest competitor to Levain in my world, but the race between the cookie stores, diabetes, and reformers will continue for the rest of the year and possibly beyond.