Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyYou’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.
Helen, Help Me!
E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.
God help anyone trying to wax poetic about a pancake. A golden circle? A saintly halo? A shining sun? No metaphor is needed to capture its simplicity: flour, egg, a bit of sugar, the gentle tangy exhale of leavening. A pancake is the anti-Cronut, the opposite of a stunty gimmick: a flat meditation on the beauty of the simple and the unremarkable, stacked to modest height. And, like so many simple foods, despite its fundamental humility, the pancake has long been a kingmaker: a killer stack can put a restaurant on the map, secure its legacy, grant it longevity. Today, lines snake around the block for Golden Diner’s fluffy stack; before that, the cult-object pancake was a thin, almost crêpe-like version at Chez Ma Tante, in Greenpoint, its frizzled edges crisped in oceans of clarified butter. There’s a pancake for every culinary era of the city: Clinton St. Baking Company owned the genre in the early two-thousands, with its Lower East Side earnestness; Bubby’s, a retro-throwback diner in Tribeca, ruled the pancake scene at the turn of the millennium. Three relatively new takes on the pancake have captured my attention recently, as modern classics of the brunch canon very much worth seeking out.
Heirloom-Masa Pancakes at Hellbender
There are exquisite golden pancakes, and then there are the pancakes that the chef Yara Herrera serves at her spectacularly appealing restaurant on a sunny corner of Ridgewood: thick, puffy, light as a whisper—and yellow as a marigold, thanks to a base of fresh masa, a dough made from ground nixtamalized corn, which brings a nutty, sunshiny dimension to the traditional pancake flavor profile. The result is distantly reminiscent of an arepa, in its texture, and of cornbread, in its sweetness. Like the version made famous at Golden Diner (which Herrera has credited as an inspiration), these are true, literal pancakes: made not on a griddle but in individual cast-iron pans, which define the pancake’s shape, constraining its boundaries and creating a distinct crispiness to the outsides that plays in beautiful counterpoint to the soft, almost meltingly creamy insides. A serving of two pancakes arrives under a brutalist slab of butter so substantial that I thought, at first, it was a thick slice of cheese.
Pancakes at S&P Lunch
The brief at S&P Lunch, a dinette-style restaurant in the Flatiron district that’s been open for three years but feels like it’s been open about a hundred, is luncheonette nostalgia, burnished to an exquisite shine. An egg-salad sandwich, a plate of pickles, a bowl of matzo-ball soup, black coffee in a smallish mug: the restaurant trades not in innovation or excitement but in a throwback New York familiarity, the dining-room equivalent of a subway token. (It occupies the former home of the venerable Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, and the grumpy-old-man spirit of the place remains virtually unchanged.) The pancakes are one of the menu’s sleeper hits: tender, tangy, with lacy faces and pale, bubbly edges, a circle of salty butter punctuating the top of the stack of three like a bull’s-eye. I suspect a fair degree of their magic comes from being cooked on the same short-order flattop as nearly everything else on the extensive menu, including uncountable burgers and cheesy omelettes. This gives the pancakes a subtle depth, something like a griddle version of wok hei. There’s so much flavor in the pancake itself that you hardly even need syrup.
Pancake Soufflé at Pitt’s
It’s arguable that this dish, the flagship dessert at chef Jeremy Salamon’s proudly kitschy Red Hook restaurant, isn’t actually a pancake: no pan, no cake. But it evokes pancakehood in an extraordinary way, by exploiting a soufflé’s essential egginess. Generally, in a soufflé, the notes are masked by punchier components, such as boozy chocolate or sharp cheese. Here, as in a proper pancake, the round, custardy flavor of egg is a keypiece of the over-all story, along with white-sugar sweetness and an edge of buttery-toasty flour. Upon arrival at the table, a server dramatically slashes into the top of the quivering soufflé and pours maple syrup into the crevasse, letting it seep into all the airy puffs and bubbles of the tender interior. It’s the best kind of clever hybrid—one that doesn’t get bogged down in its own cleverness, and which playfully illuminates the fundamental joys of both pancakes and soufflés. Pitt’s is open for dinner only, so this is, by necessity, more of an evening pancake; pair it with the restaurant’s take on an espresso Martini, punched up with notes of coconut and blood orange, for a complete brunch-after-dark moment. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
