Finished!

By the end of Cookie Quest, those who'd been with us the whole day had eaten 15 different chocolate chip cookies and walked over 8 miles! We also exercised our critical faculties by rating and writing about each cookie we tasted. Our final overall cookie order:

1. City Bakery
2. Levain Bakery
3. Roasting Plant
4. Blue Ribbon Bakery
5. Ruby et Violette
6. Alice's Tea cup
7. Jacques Torres Chocolate Haven
8. Milk & Cookies
9. Bouchon Bakery
10. Insomnia Cookies
11. Max Brenner
12. Momofuku
13. Good N Plenty
14. LifeThyme
15. Dessert Club Chikalicious

Best Texture: 1. Levain; 2. City Bakery; 3. Roasting Plant
Best Chocolate Quality: 1. Alice's Tea Cup; 2. Jacques Torres; 3. City Bakery
Best Cookie Composition: 1. City Bakery; 2. Levain; 3. Roasting Plant

CQ Stop #15: Levain Bakery

Levain Bakery
Price: $4.00
Texture: 4.71 out of 5
Chocolate Quality: 3.5 out of 5
Cookie Composition: 4.44 out of 5
Overall Rating: 4.4 out of 5
2nd Best Cookie
Best Texture, 2nd Best Cookie Composition

Assorted Comments: "My perfect cookie! Crunchy outside, gooey / melty inside, thick, YUM. Good chocolate to cookie ratio" -Anneka Fagundes "Perfectly melty inside, crisp outside, almost doughy" -Ilya Kushnirsky "Nuts. :(" -Jason Eppink "A delicious mound" -Emily Young "Delicious, would be better with no nuts and better chocolate" -Naomi Huth "Huge, gooey, decadent. I just want a different chocolate" -Clay Ewing

Serious Eats #3: Levain Bakery, 167 West 74th Street
"This is incredible." "Melts in your mouth." "So moist! And so tasty." "I could eat this forever. But then I would die." Sure, it was a massive barely baked lump of dough. But such a good barely baked lump of dough. When we tallied up the scores, Levain came out on top. That said, there were a few hard-core anti-Levainites. "That's not a chocolate chip cookie! Homie don't play that." "This would be great, in a blondie taste-test." "Was this actually baked? I'm a little salmonella-nervous."

The Walk to Find More Cookies Continues

Cookie Quest 2010!

And so it begins again...

You may remember the rousing success that was last year's Pizza Expedition: The Search for the Best Neapolitan Pizza in New York City. May 29th we took the next step with Cookie Quest: The Hunt for the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie in Manhattan. Cookie Quest took us all over Manhattan (by foot), including many of the spots featured in Serious Eats' New York Chocolate Chip Cookie Championships: We started at 11:00 am on Saturday, May 29. Cookie Quest lasted until 6:30pm. Some people joined or left at various points, but those who made it to the end had tasted some of the best chocolate chip cookies to be found in Manhattan.