A friend of ours, while talking about getting together for a recent meal at Park Slope’s Al di La, told me that her mother had once accidentally referred to the restaurant as ‘La di Da’ and had yet to live it down. It’s a telling solecism, because nearly ten years after the restaurant opened its doors for the first time, it can be still legendarily hard to snag a table there–and this is Brooklyn. Thanks to lots of favorable press, Al di La has become so popular that husband and wife team Anna Klinger and Emiliano Coppa still have to turn away prospective diners during almost every single service. And yet, the locals don’t seem to mind much. Every time we go, we find ourselves wondering: For what other Brooklyn restaurant would diners cheerfully wait an hour, an hour-and-a-half, or more in order to eat a meal?

The wait derives largely from Al di La’s egalitarian no-reservations policy–whether you’re a celebrity, a luminary, or even an old friend of Anna’s, prepare yourself for a wait–either outside Al di La’s crowded Fifth Avenue doorway, or at the Al di La wine bar around the corner (the two rooms connect via the very busy kitchen). And if waiting for a la-di-da table in the main dining room, with its brick walls and red-and-white circus print drapery gets to be too much, diners can opt to eat from the full menu in the wine bar itself. As an added bonus, eating in the wine bar offers access to a wine list that extends beyond the Italian-only selections of the main dining room.

But we are the sorts who like a table, and still, the wait is worth every minute. Almost everything we have ordered at Al di La, over many visits, has been both remarkable and remarkably consistent. A few items even make you sit up straight and take notice: for instance, the swiss chard and ricotta malfatti (pictured left, $13), a crowd-pleaser that has been on the menu for years with good reason. These soft, slightly chewy gnudi are simply emerald mounds of cheesy, doughy pleasure, made all the more enjoyable by a light sauce of sage and brown butter. Truffle and ricotta tortelli (pictured on Flickr, $18) demand equal attention, with their sweet sheep’s milk ricotta and strong but not overpowering hit of black truffle shavings. Rounding out our favorite pasta dishes is an gnocchi special made with a beef cheek ragu (pictured on Flickr, $15) so savory it seems purpose-built for a glass of hearty Sangiovese and a mopping-up with some of Al di La’s sturdy bread.

While favorites like the malfatti, the beet and ricotta ravioli, and the braised rabbit and polenta are deservedly year-round menu residents, certain specials also earn their more seasonal places on the restaurant’s rota. Chief among these are the cichetti (pictured top, $14)–Venice’s version of tapas–which can include anything from tender roasted octopus to a wonderful baccala with pickled onions and fried polenta wedges. The frequently changing side dishes are also a treat: on our most recent night, an order of unprepossessingly named ‘greens’ (pictured above right, $5) yielded a hot pot of of savory, soft, creamy cranberry beans (borlotti beans) and nearly greaseless broccoli rabe.

Main dishes are nearly as good as the starters. A recent special of wild striped bass (pictured above, $26) shines brightly with a supple, moist texture and sides of nutty sautéed Jerusalem artichokes, green garlic and oyster mushrooms. A plate of calf’s liver (pictured right, $15) is prepared in a traditional Venetian style with reduced red wine and balsamic vinegar, allowing the deep, ferric richness of the liver to play against a sweet and acidic background. And here too, fried triangles of creamy polenta make a very welcome re-appearance.

If there are any small disappointments at Al di La, they come at the end of the meal, for the desserts, while quite good, are less original and exciting than the breathtaking pasta, ravioli and gnocchi. An apple galette dusted with with powdered sugar and crowned with vanilla ice cream is refreshing, but something we’ve seen many times before. A trio of gelatos is restorative, but with the only the most predictable flavors: vanilla, hazelnut, and chocolate. All perfectly lovely, just not quite as magical as anything the restaurant makes with cheese or basil.

Still, eating at Al di La is almost always a great experience, with a consistency and quality of cooking matched by few other restaurants. Al di La’s seasonal variations on its Venetian and Northern Italian theme have held up so superbly–even evolving into more perfect versions of themselves over the course of a decade–that it is no surprise that half of Brooklyn seems to show up at the restaurant for every meal it serves. And if they do have to wait an hour or two once they arrive, a few bites of Anna’s malfatti ought to make them forget all about it.

Al di La Trattoria, 248 Fifth Avenue (at Carroll Street), Park Slope, Brooklyn, 718-783-4565.

Durian is a hard sell, we know. Any fruit that tastes like a cross between a banana and an onion, with a smell like a natural gas leak is doomed to be an acquired taste. Nevertheless, on the other side of the initial cringing and nose-wrinkling lies a creamy fruit pulp that, in a single ingredient, perfectly straddles the sweet-savory boundary. And given the recent trendiness of salt-sweet hybrids, we figure it’s just a matter of time before chefs start holding their noses and reaching for a few of Chinatown’s hanging mesh bags of spiny durian.

Before that happens, we would like share a product we found recently that might help ease your palate gently into the world of durian: Rhinoceros (no affiliation with Marc Ecko) brand Durian Flavour Sting Cookies. Ridiculously inexpensive at $1.99 for a 9.5 ounce bucket (at Hong Kong Supermarkets in Manhattan and Sunset Park, Brooklyn), these little Vietnamese cookies are made with whipped tapioca starch and are pressed out into long, meringue-light shapes, then baked. The ’sting’ in the cookies’ name comes from their prickly surface markings–not from any sort of hidden heat or shocking surprise. The bumpy treats are perfect to set out in a dish at the end of a dinner party, and because their durian aroma is very subtle–the predominant flavor of the cookies is sweet coconut cream–it is easy to eat six or seven of the spiny little snacks before you even notice the nuances from the durian. And when you do, the aromas are soft and tempered by the sweetness and richness of the other ingredients. No sting here whatsoever, no matter what the label says.

After two years as the pivot point of the Top Chef judging team, everyone from Sacramento to Savannah recognizes Tom Colicchio as a man who knows something about food. Yet despite a growing mini-empire that comprises nearly a dozen restaurants, relatively few people have actually eaten anything cooked in one of them. Colicchio’s reputation as a critic is, for the vast majority of the nation, more salient than his reputation as a chef, and this does not necessarily work in his favor. Take our recent meal at Craftbar as an example: As HungryMan and I waited for an old friend to meet us, we overheard at least three groups of diners in the raucously loud dining room cattily mimicking a few of Tom C.’s recently televised barbs. If the old adage about glass houses holds true for restaurant owners, we cannot help but admire the guts it must take to provide diners with their own bread basket full of stones.

As difficult as it may be to be impartial about Colicchio, it is impossible to ignore that the man has a gift for savory food. Craftbar’s informal, enoteca-style menu, with its emphasis on cured meats and cheeses, is the perfect context to show off this skill–executed on a daily basis by Lauren Hirschberg, Craftbar’s Chef de Cuisine. Indeed, our favorite dishes of the meal were ones where salty elements breathed life into the food. The best, a cold mixed baby beet salad (pictured left, $12), sounded pedestrian enough, but wound up tasting as sweet as fruit, thanks to a crumbling of pungent blue cheese and a balanced vinaigrette–the choice of a saltier, sharper cheese made all the difference. So too, in the chickpea fries with black olive aioli (pictured on Flickr, $7), a bar snack with a tender, almost custard-like interior. Alone, the fries tasted a bit like crunchy planks of tamago sushi, but when dipped in the olive spread, they acquired a fragrant peppery flavor that made them a wonderful partner for a glass of red wine. Only one dish was perhaps a bit too savory–the orecchiette with fennel sausage and ricotta salata (pictured top, $10). But even this dish, with its aromatic spicing, was still quite decent and required just a little judicious culling of a few of the stiff white cubes of aged ricotta.

Another main, the daurade with brussels sprouts (pictured right, $21) was surprisingly filling, thanks to a generous portion of soft and smoky brussels sprouts that looked as if they had bloomed into papery green layers from dollhouse-scale cabbages. Thanks to the bacon, this was another salty dish, but one where all the components worked well together. Our friend’s crispy polenta with mushroom ragout (pictured on Flickr, $16), one of the two vegetarian main dishes, seemed a bit out of step with the season and probably better suited to an autumn menu. It was, unfortunately, also too oily and ended up being the only plate of food we did not finish.

And we had plenty of time to try–our server left our table uncleared for nearly 45 minutes. Still, even the lapses in service did not deter us from ordering the brown sugar cake with roasted pineapple and rum vanilla ice cream ($10). All three of us agreed that the pineapple and the potently alcoholic scoop of vanilla bean ice cream were superb. The cake itself also was not bad, by any means–just a bit too sweet and, ironically, missing one thing that would have made it really wonderful, something we bet Tom himself would not hesitate to toss in: A little more salt.

Craftbar, 900 Broadway (near 20th Street), 212-461-4300.

3 things we’re loving this week:

1. Food for Design’s novel and visually intuitive FOODPAIRING website. Displaying relationships among and between foods on spidery, cladogram-like starbursts, the site offers new ways of thinking about ingredients. We have used the site to create a few wonderful dishes we never would have considered before: a dill and sambuca aioli crab salad, and a roasted cauliflower side dish made even better with crushed, roasted almonds.

2. Icelandic chocolate from Noi Sirius (sold domestically at Whole Foods Markets). We have written about excellent Icelandic candies before, so we knew the little island nation made some great sweets, but Noi Sirius’s premium bar chocolate–available in milk and dark–surprised us with its ultra-smooth, grain-free texture. It also makes some of the best chocolate frosting we have eaten…and it’s not too bad for snacking.

3. Miolo Vineyard’s 2006 Pinot Noir, probably the best $10 bottle of red wine you’ll buy this year. And it won’t be that inexpensive for long–this fruity, moderately tannic red is only a bargain because of its provenance. Winemakers from the Vale dos Vinhedos have applied the hard-earned South American viticultural wisdom of the past three decades and have quietly started producing some stellar wines. Sure, Brazil might not be the first country you think of when you shop for a pinot noir, but if the country keeps producing wines with this kind of structured acidity and balance, Napa and the Yarra Valley might have some stiff competition in the New World.

Add another worthy lunch destination to the expanding list of eateries in and around the old South Street Seaport. Table Tales, the diminutive storefront to caterer Grace Clerihew’s expanding operations, opened stealthily two years ago, just north of the Seaport on Water Street and after some early-stage growing pains, is now really hitting its stride. Not very long ago, getting a taste of Clerihew’s food required an VIP invite to a Hugo Boss event or a seat at a catered board meeting at one of the nearby financial service companies on Wall Street, but now, her satisfyingly homestyle food is available to anybody wandering through the neighborhood. Don’t think for a second we’re missing our chance.

At lunchtime, the range of hot and cold sandwiches rarely disappoints. We love how the buttermilk chicken sandwich (pictured left, $8.50) elevates the humble –and surprisingly moist–breast with a crispy coating of buttermilk and flour, along with a tangy, ‘cajun’ mayonnaise studded with red and yellow peppers. Then there is the savory pressed ham ‘prosciutto cotto‘ sandwich (pictured below, $8.25) busting with thin slices of sweet-savory ham against a schmear of goat cheese. This might be a perfect pork coldcut sandwich, were it not for an occasionally aggressive application of mustard–ask for a gentle hand with the dijon. Better than both of these is the delightfully messy corned beef reuben ($8.25), made the traditional way with sauerkraut, swiss cheese and zesty Russian dressing on rye, then modernized by pressing it flat and crunchy in a hot sandwich press. If there were a pastrami version, we might never eat lunch elsewhere.

As good as the sandwiches can be at Table Tales, the side dishes are notable enough to order on their own. Particularly meritorious is the potato salad - made with sour cream and a strong hit of dill, it is like a distillation of Stockholm in springtime. Baked goods are another strength–especially the gooey, chunky chocolate chip cookies that miraculously never seem to fall apart.

One minor downside to Table Tales is that at the end of the day, it can’t hide its status as adjunct to the much-larger catering operation. Judging from the number of people moving in and out of the shop, there is clearly plenty of action happening behind the door to the kitchen, which we suspect of being twice the size of the dining room. This has a practical consequence for diners, in that if you arrive too late–much past 12:30 on a weekday–the four small tables and the communal eating area are filled with hungry customers. So until Clerihew redeploys some of the real estate from the catering side to the restaurant, we recommend you get your order in before noon. Otherwise, there just won’t be any Table Tales left to be told.

Table Tales, 243 Water Street, between Fulton Street and Peck Slip, 212-766-2370.

For some people, Easter baskets signal the beginning of spring; for some, it is the blooming yellow forsythia; and for others, it is matzoh. While there may not be anything inherently seasonal about the ingredients in hard, crunchy unleavened bread, matzoh’s pride of place in the spring Passover celebration makes it as much a hallmark of the coming warmth as any daffodil. At the same time, matzoh is not particularly appealing on its own. Sure, its cracker-esque snap feels great in the mouth, but even slathered in butter, matzoh tends to be among the world’s blandest foods.

Vosges Haut-Chocolat chocolatier Katrina Markoff’s brute force solution–to cover the tasteless matzoh with such large quantities of dark chocolate that the matzoh’s flavor becomes almost academic–might seem extreme, but it works. To be fair, we have fallen for this trick many times before, as we found ourselves blissfully scarfing down thickly enrobed prunes, haystacks of fibrous lemongrass, and once, long ago, ants. No surprise then that a little Jewish hardtack would benefit from the same treatment.

Where Vosges’s concept really takes off is when another element is added to the dark chocolate mix–in this case, charoset, another Passover staple made from apples, cinnamon and walnuts. The result tastes like a Willy Wonka trail mix of nutty and fruity flavors, all set against the prominent backdrop of ultra-rich chocolate.

And just as we were making plans to purchase a few of the 3 ounce containers ($14 each) as holiday gifts, we discovered the ultimate irony: These snacks are not kosher for Passover. A pretty cruel twist, but at least the chocolate matzohs keep well for three months, which leaves plenty of time to enjoy them after the week-long holiday ends. Plus really, who really wants chocolate fingerprints all over the seder plate?

Vosges Haut-Chocolat, (SoHo and UES branches: See the Vosges website for addresses and hours).

No one could ever accuse Garment District newcomer Macaron Café of inauthenticity; on our first visit to the tiny, brightly lighted shop, we were offered a bowl of the day’s ‘oignon soup’. Then a few days later, the be-ascotted owner asked us if we wanted ‘milk or sucre in our café’. And then yesterday, as Midtown Lunch Zach and I convened for a midday snack, we learned that the day’s special was a healthy eight-grain crêpe with plenty of ‘laitue.’ Yet, this is not a bad thing: When the restaurant’s eponymous pastry is as tricky to get right as is the macaron, the guttural ‘r’ sounds of a sirop-thick French accent are precisely what you want to hear from the staff.

After nibbling our way through more than ten flavors of the shop’s signature item, we’ll go out on a limb and just say it: These are the best and certainly freshest macarons in town right now. Every variety we have tasted possesses its own distinct charms, but our favorites feature flavors that highlight unexpected aromas and sensations, like the rose litchee macaron, a brilliant, iridescent pink meringue disk (pictured in foreground, above) so subtly floral that it elevates and amplifies fundamental flavors of butter and salt in the ganache. Or the cinnamon macaron, with an aromatic zip that makes the crunchy top and bottom layers of the treat postively crackle when it is chewed. At $1.75 for each half-dollar-sized macaron, these are not inexpensive treats, but with dozens of nuanced varieties and hues–enough to make Pantone jealous–they are undoubtedly worth the splurge.

At the same time, the little café, with its range of exquisite $5.50-$6.50 sandwiches is the site of one of Midtown Manhattan’s best lunch bargains. Prepared fresh at the back of the shop, Macaron Café’s French-Italian sandwiches are all made on artisan bread from venerable Hunt’s Point wholesaler, Il Forno, and are big and chunky–some even large enough to share. Seated at the rear of the restaurant, at the tall leatherette bench, Midtown Lunch Zach and I did precisely that, splitting a Capri (pictured right, $5.50) and a Norvegien (pictured below, $6.50) between us. The Capri sandwich, filled with thick rounds of fresh goat cheese, apples, raisins, and toasted pine nuts, was sweet and tangy, with just enough fat from the homemade mayonnaise to bring all the flavors together–this was a sandwich that reminded me of something I might make to take along to a picnic, the kind of lunch that could be carried in a basket for hours and still emerge with a little crunch, hours later. In a more urban context, it is the ideal sandwich to buy and store in your desk until that interminable noontime meeting finally finishes.

The Norvegien, on the other hand, a sultry, smoked salmon and capers sandwich on thick slices of Pugliese-style bread, was the sort of lunch that demanded immediate consumption. We were glad to oblige. While ours was slathered a bit too generously with the pepper and ‘persil’ sauce (parsley–not to be confused with actual Persil), the Norvegien still managed to be the highlight of my day–after all, I am a little bit of a sucker for any sort of savory treat that is served with a big jug of water and a glass of ice. As Zach and I watched the late-lunchtime droves snap up everything, down to the last crumbs of bread, from the shop, we discussed the café’s growing crowds–up at least 50% since my first visit last month–and the imminent changes that will come when the café gets the attention it deserves. And as much as we would both like to keep the place a secret, it is far too good for that. We both suspect the layout of the shop will change to maximize interior space and prices may climb a bit, but as long as the sandwiches remain stellar and the macarons top-notch, I will be perfectly happy to stand in line with the crowds for my déjeuner.

Macaron Café, 161 West 36th Street (near Seventh Avenue), 646-573-5048.

Brunch at Danal is a high concept-affair. Just as Peter Mayle might have imagined a casual meal in a faux French estate: Chintz on the walls, yellow and blue tablecloths on the mismatched wooden tables, pillows casually placed on benches-cum-banquettes. Yet it all feels too phony for its own good–less a restaurant than a service to an American vision of Gallic leisure and gastronomy, a weird gloss on French countryside meets lower Fifth Avenue. Like the first Laura Ashley shop, Danal is one of those places that would have been new and unusual in the 1980s; it might even have inspired lines out the door. Today, the restaurant, despite a recent move from a truly diminutive space in the East Village to a much larger, bi-level space near 13th and Fifth, feels distinctly like it’s going through the motions, or worse, marking time.

When three good friends joined me for brunch at Danal last weekend, we first took notice of the reasonably priced menu: everything, including non-brunch items like the salade nicoise and the meatloaf, is priced below $15, and many items are $12 or $13. Keeping with the general theme, coffee is served in a French press–but impressively, one large enough for the table to share. And the coffee is indeed excellent, albeit rarely refilled.

Unfortunately, brunch items are at once too much and too little, and with the inexplicable Ibero-Hispanic fusion, also a bit unsettling. The breakfast burrito (pictured left, $13) is, to begin with, a strange choice on the menu for an generally French Provencal brunch. It is also the first sign that the Latin-leaning identity confusion might well indicate that Danal does not really know what it wants to be. Worse, with eggs, chorizo, peppers, sour cream, and onions, there are simply far too many components on the plate for the burrito to resolve into a coherent whole. A smoked salmon omelette (pictured right, also $13) on the other hand is far too simple and lacks any burst of flavor. The swiss cheese and tomatoes do nothing to enhance the flavor of the of the salmon, steering the omelette perilously close to becoming a salty wash-out. The only thing of interest here is a stew of spiced apples, raisins and walnuts that reads curiously like that Passover staple, charoset. Could there be a displaced Latin-Jewish tribe living somewhere in the south of France? The only brunch entrée to pack a punch of flavor is the quesadilla (pictured below, $13) with shrimp, tomatoes and cheese which, while again not particularly French, beguiles with a mildly spicy seasoning and a tartly-dressed side salad.

Service at Danal is not its strongest suit: It is often hurried and impersonal, with easily distracted staff who do not seem to be able to cope well with the sizeable brunch rush. We would have preferred more time with our server, or at least more than a perfunctory check-back, especially when all of our glasses were empty and we were sucking on the grounds in the bottom of our French press. The restaurant’s move from a cramped location to a much roomier one ought to have invigorated the staff and the cooking, but that that seems not to have happened. Instead, the chilled-out décor and the harried staff just reinforce Danal’s strangely split personality–casual, Provencal clichés do not mix well with frantic servers and lackluster Spanish-accented French dishes. We don’t know the diagnosis for this disease, but we certainly know the cure: Danal seems a good candidate for professional help, preferably from a Freudian with a good palate.

Danal, 59 5th Avenue (at 13th Street), 212-982-6930.

The first time I visited Italy, it was precisely this time of year–a season when the Tuscan dirt had finally lost its wintery crunch and café tables just started to reappear on sidewalks. It was also then, as if synchronized by the ringing of a thorny green alarm clock somewhere in Rome, that every restaurant in the nation started serving the year’s first baby artichokes. Apparently the West Village is in the same culinary time zone, because as our old friend DJB, HungryMan and I scanned the menu at Rita Sodi’s new West Village bistro, we spotted artichokes in more than half the dishes. Not a bad first impression, especially from a restaurant run by a first-time restaurateur.

After a bittersweet, Aperol-rich Caroussel Negroni–a house specialty ($12), we got into the spirit of the seasonal menu and ordered two artichoke starters. One, the insalata di carciofi ($11), a shaved salad of raw baby artichokes, lemon juice and Parmigiano cheese, was the most dangerous dish on the menu. This high-risk salad works only if the baby artichokes are super fresh and immature–even an extra day or two of growing gives the little carciofi a woody character that renders them unsuitable for serving raw. I Sodi’s version was a really fine attempt that was only occasionally undone by a couple of too-fibrous leaves. That said, we admire their unwillingness not to use the sneaky chef’s cheat of par-boiling older artichokes and trying to pass them off as raw.

Better still–and quite possibly the best thing we ate all evening–was the carciofi fritti, a side order of fried artichokes ($7) that was soft, nutty, and intensely salty. As long as the artichokes are in season, we’d love to see this dish paired with lemon juice and a little mustard and promoted from contorno to appetizer; it deserves it.

DJB continued the artichoke theme through to her main, the lasagne carciofi (pictured on Flickr, $16), a classic layered pasta dish with béchamel and strata of rich, smoky-sweet rough artichoke purée. The full portion was hefty, but still quite manageable.

HungryMan’s full order of pappardelle al cinghiale (pictured on Flickr, $16) was another substantial plate of pasta, and one worth going easy on the appetizers for–the aromatic wild boar ragú, with its aromas of game and rosemary had everyone drooling. This is the sort of sauce that only works with thick ribbons of pasta, and the pappardelle did not dissapoint. Even though we tend to think of this as more of a winter dish, it still worked well on a nippy late March evening, regardless of what the calendar might have read.

My risotto frutti di mare ($18 for a full order) was also hearty and even a little sweet–although that may have been the lingering effects of my earlier gorging on artichokes as much as the flavor from caramelized onions in the dish. No matter–the effect was lovely and worked well with the creamy short-grain rice and plump chunks of octopus. The dish was so filling that I realized halfway through it that I probably ought to have ordered a half-portion. Next time, for sure.

We capped our meal with two desserts: a trio of gelati–hazelnut, blood orange, and dark chocolate–and a serving of the restaurant’s chocolate salami–a compressed faux-sausage of rich chocolate dough and crushed biscotti flecks. We all enjoyed the gelati, brought in from Capogiro in Philadelphia and typical of the high-quality, upper-tier products they sell in their shop, to restaurants, and through mail order. But we were all mesmerized by the dense, brownie-like sweet ’salami’, with its buttery cookie nuggets; it left us with a lingering taste of something unique, and more importantly, with a real desire to come back for more. If Chef Michael Genardini’s very wise and very well-executed adherence to a seasonal theme continues, we’ll be back in a few weeks when the weather shifts again–asparagus anyone?

I Sodi, 105 Christopher Street (near Bleecker Street), 212-414-5774.

3 things we’re loving this week:

1. Laura Schenone’s page-turner, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family–part sleuth story, part love song to the elasticity of flat sheets of pasta, and part sociocultural examination of how Italy’s pre-WWI economics shaped how we eat today. More to the point, it’ll make you crave anything filled with ricotta.

2. Ippudo’s Shiromaru Classic tonkotsu ramen (pictured right and more photos on our Flickr photostream, $13 for a large bowl)–with its intense pork aroma and filament-thin hakatamen, this is a contender for the most sophisticated bowl of noodles in the city. The light, soy-flavored broth is boiled with pork bones and seasonings for fifteen hours, a process that gives the translucent soup an astounding depth of flavor. When the tender cloud ear mushrooms, roasted pork belly and scallions are added to the mix, it is easy to see just how refined a bowl of noodles can be.

3. Dessert delivered to our front door, courtesy of Insomnia Cookies. If you are lucky enough to live in the strip of Manhattan from Broome Street north to 14th Street, you fall within the delivery catchment area for the first non-university branch of Seth Berkowitz’s cookie bakery. Already winning the hearts of overworked junior legal associates and management consultants shackled to their desks, Insomnia is also benefiting from plenty of positive neighborhood buzz, thanks to its low prices ($0.90/cookie and $1.00/brownie) and late hours (the 8th Street & 6th Avenue shop is open daily until 3 o’clock in the morning). And really, is there a better solution than a chocolate mint brownie when you can’t sleep at 2:15 a.m.?