Looking for a decent soft pretzel in New York City is a little like being thirsty in the middle ocean. There are pretzels everywhere, sold from ubiquitous street carts, but they’re completely inedible. Occaisionally one stumbles across handmade pretzels at a German bar like Loreley or Zum Scheider, but these places lack the get-it-and-go convenience of a cart. Sigmund Pretzel Shop, which opened last month, finally gives the Bavarian snack its due. A cafe and bakery headed by a former Bouley pastry chef, Sigmund sells fresh pretzels made on-site in small batches. Flavors include jalapeño cheddar, gruyere and paprika, garlic and parsley, salt, sesame, poppy, whole wheat, caramel, and cinnamon raisin ($3.00-$3.50). A choice of dip–whipped butter, herbed goat cheese, cream cheese, whole-grain mustard, honey mustard, or horseradish mayo–is included.  Pretzel sandwiches and donuts are also available.

The jalapeno-cheddar pretzel was by far my favorite. It was doughy and still-warm, with the cheese forming slightly-crunchy crust. Its lack of spice was forgiven since the whole-grain mustard dip added the needed kick. Although best eaten warm, it also travels extremely well. The cinnamon raisin pretzel with butter walked a fine line between savory and sweet, without being overly sugary or greasy. The passionfruit coconut donut was basically a thin doughy shell surrounding an intriguingly sweet-and-tart custard, but on the whole, I found it a little too sweet for a snack.

Seating is available, and with the smell of fresh-baked bread wafting from the kitchen and a row of windows overlooking Avenue B, this is a mellow place to stop for a quick bite. Try to go earlier to grab a fresh pretzel–they start selling out near closing time.

Sigmund Pretzel Shop
29 Avenue B between 2nd and 3rd St.
Tues-Sun 10am-10pm or until sold out. Closed Mon.

I’ll let you in on a secret: Frankie’s Spuntino, a cozy spot for reliably delicious Italian fare, serves a pretty damn good brunch. Just a few doors down from where weekend hordes queue up outside Clinton Street Bakery, I had some of the finest french toast in town–without waiting for a table. When I heard Frankie’s was opening Cafe Pedlar next door, I dutifully marched down to Clinton Street to sit in a sunbeam and sample some pastries. Keeping up Snackish is a dirty job sometimes but someone has to do it.

Cafe Pedlar serves Stumptown coffee, a name I hear thrown around so much I’m starting to wonder if they’re trying to annex a little bit of Starbuck’s turf. No matter, as the barista coaxed a fine cappuccino ($3.75) from the La Marzocco espresso machine. The pastries were even better. I sampled a moist and spongey olive oil cake with lemon zest ($3.50) and the pièce de résistance, a slice of crunchy french toast ($4.00). This was french toast imagined as pastry, a piece of eggy bread encased in a crisp maple syrup shell, served room temperature and eatable on the go, if you don’t mind sticky fingers.

The room will feel familiar to anyone living on the Lower East Side–a narrow, ground-floor dwelling with brick walls and few windows. Spartan’s the word when your main decoration is a shelf of wine bottles. But the open tables and mellow Bob Dylan tunes on the stereo invited lingering, whereas many of my favorite coffee shops (sorry Think, Abraço, and Ninth Street Espresso) seem designed to hustle me back onto the street. Next time I’m bringing a book and trying one of their delicately-twisted soft pretzels.

Cafe Pedlar and Frankies Spuntino also have Cobble Hill locations.

Cafe Pedlar
17 Clinton St. between Houston and Stanton. 7am-5pm Daily

Last night I slept under the covers. This is notable because during August my apartment never drops below a steamy 80 degrees (I dislike air conditions, ugly white-noise units that down out my window symphony of crickets, owls, cars, and clattering dishes from the restaurant next door). So the end of summer is usually a relief, like a fever breaking.  The only downside is that there’s just a few days left to pick up my favorite Greenmarket snack, before they go out of season.

Fresh peaches from the Greenmarket put supermarket peaches to shame. Ripe, unbruised, and fragrant, with a deep golden hue and sweet, juicy flesh, they taste a little like the local answer to mangoes. They’re delicious eaten alone or with vanilla ice cream or garnishing a plain cereal like Special K. Italians serve them sangria-style soaked in red wine. I grabbed two for $1 on my last visit, which seems steep until you taste them.

Peaches don’t ripen off the tree so be sure to pick a ripe one and eat it as soon as possible. Look for a deep golden background color, no bruises, and a strong, peachy fragrance. They should give a bit when squeezed. If you’re holding one that isn’t fuzzy, it’s a nectarine.

If you’re a peach fan, don’t miss this peach dessert slideshow.

Union Square Greenmarket
Union Square West between 14th St, and 17th St.
Mon, Wed, Fri, and Sat 8am-6pm

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

The Japanese just might be the modern-day masters of cute. But wagashi, adorable pastries shaped like fruit, birds, and flowers, have served as traditional tea ceremony snacks for centuries. Although rare on this side of the Pacific, Minamoto Kitchoan sells wagashi in bright array, spot-lit in glass cases like the baubles at Tiffany’s.

Enjoyment of wagashi hinges on one’s opinion of the mochi (rice paste), sweet red-bean paste, and jellied fruits they’re made from. If you like treats that are sweet and potato-textured you’re in luck. But if in doubt, ingredient and freshness information is meticulously displayed on the oft-impenetrable plastic packaging.

A selection is pictured above. Hakuun-no-hotori ($3 – bottom left) consisted of condensed milk and sweet beans wrapped in crepe. Fukuwatashisenbei ($2 – top left) was really more of a classic vanilla wafer, with crisp, butter cookies encasing smooth crème. The pumpkin-shaped one ($2 – top middle) had a moist thin rice layer wrapped around sweet pumpkin-spiked beans. Wagashi can be bought individually for two or three bucks although a box of Shunen, pictured at the top of this post, will set you back a steep $27. (The petals are white bean paste wrapped in pink rice cake, while the middle is rice cake and merengue). Staff are unfailingly friendly, (as I stared at the daunting word Fukuwatashisenbei, one counterperson offered kindly, “cookie?”). Seasonal wagashi are available - this cherry blossom dessert on nycnosh looks too good to eat.

Minamoto Kitchoan
608 Fifth Avenue New York, NY
Sun-Thu 10am-7:30pm, Fri-Sat 10am-8pm