This bakery does a body good.
Momofuku Milk Bar opened its first storefront, the Brooklyn Commissary, in its Williamsburg-based dessert kitchen last week, giving its devoted dairy denizens a place to sip the borough’s best soft-serve shake and chew its tastiest cookies.
For the past year, customers ordered dangerously addictive cookies and pies from a window in the pastry factory’s garage right off Metropolitan Avenue.
But Milk Bar manager Christina Tosi wanted a place to show off her staff’s impressive array of cakes and shakes, including her signature cereal milk frozen yogurt shake with a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes toppings, which she made as Momofuku’s pastry chef.
“I knew it needed to be clever, different — when you have a tasting menu you have to fight for your cake to be remembered,” said Tosi.
Like Tosi’s cereal confection, the Milk Bar’s café is sweet, cleverly quirky, and just a bit nostalgic.
Customers can examine the day’s offerings scrawled out on a 12-foot slate blackboard or peak at a delicious display of baked goods arrayed under glass, including bagel bombs, pistachio croissants, blueberry and cream cookies and candy bar pie.
Everything is made in house — or rather in the ample bakery behind the store.
Once the site of an eBay storage space and a poultry slaughterhouse, the garage has been transformed into a commercial kitchen that produces wedding cakes, pies, and more than 1,200 butter-bursting cookies each day.
For now, cookies and pie slices remain a top seller, though its cold-brewed iced coffee isn’t far behind.
And dairy fans are hotly anticipating mixed milk drinks — such as cereal milk White Russians — which will appear on the commissary’s menu later this summer.
Milk Bar Brooklyn (382 Metropolitan Ave. at Havemeyer Street in Williamsburg, no phone). Open Sun-Thurs, 9 am-10 pm; Fri-Sat, 9 am-11 pm. For info, www.momofuku.com/restaurants/milk-bar.
