As a kid, I ate a lot of cereal. I knew the exact number of minutes it took for Rice Chex to get soggy. I knew how to eat Fruit Loops without scraping the top of my mouth on their sandpapery sugar coating. I could pick all the crunchberries out of a box of Cap’n Crunch, and leave it looking untouched. Even so, I had my limits. It usually crossed my mind to slurp the milk from my bowl when I’d finished my cereal, but there was something just faintly repellent about it, enough to keep me from doing it most of the time.

So sipping a plastic cup of cereal milk ($4) at Momofuku Desert Bar was, for me, a bittersweet dose of nostalgia. If you were the type of kid who did not feel conflicted at all about drinking milk steeped in Frosted Flakes, you probably shouldn’t miss this.  Fortunately there are enough items on the menu to keep the rest of us entertained.

The cookies ($1.75 each), for example, are top-notch examples of junk food fusion. The conflake-marshmallow-chocolate chip cookie puts the breakfast staple to better use, adding buttery crunch to its edges, while melted marshmallow centers remind me of the gooey hearts of rice krispie treats. It’s better than its vaguely saltier cousin, the compost cookie, which fuses chocolate and butterscotch chips with potato chips and pretzels. The corn cookie and blueberry cookies are both delicious, like the butter-soaked caps of muffins, but I’d skip the comparatively unexciting peanut butter cookie. Soft serve ($4) in unusual flavors, including sour gummy and red licorice, is another speciality here, and every customer is entitled to a tiny free sample. Even though I never liked gob stoppers, I can’t get enough of the fireball flavor. Individually-unwrapped ground-up gumballs add a touch of dimestore cinnamon, tempered by cool ice cream. Their website announces some new flavors, like rosemary and apricot, available starting June 17th.

The cakes ($5/piece) are a little more hit-or-miss. I found the dulce de leche cake and the tea-jelly-and-lemon Arnold Palmer cake overly sweet with little payoff. But both the banana cream-and-hazlenut crunch cake and simple pecan-based “crack” pie were almost worth the caloric sacrifice.

(photo by gothambill)

And then of course there’s always the showstopper, the pork buns ($9/two buns) made famous from David Chang’s other hotspots, Momofuku and Ssam Bar. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Momofuku so it’s hard to remember how the Milk Bar’s buns stack up. But most certainly, these tender, fatty slabs of pork belly folded on sweet, spongy steamed buns with pickled cucumber and hoisin sauce are the most decadent things on the menu.

If you’re planning to visit, prepare for weekend lines, loud music, and standing-only tables, but when all is said and done, a ten-minute wait goes quickly when what you really want is a conflake cookie and a taste of free soft serve. The best time to visit is early evening, but check their website since they are sometimes closed for private parties.

Momofuku Milk Bar
207 Second Ave (entrance on 13th Street)
Mon-Fri 8am-12am, Sat-Sun 9am-12am