Thick, caramelized in color, drenched in honey butter, and topped with compote, the masa pancake at Cocina Consuelo has earned the Harlem restaurant accolades. But it was a happy accident: It wasn’t always a part of the menu.
When Karina Garcia and Lalo Rodriguez had initially opened Cocina Consuelo as a small uptown cafe — which started as a supper club — they envisioned a regular wheat pancake. But when a diner who was gluten-free made the trek to the restaurant from New Jersey, Garcia whipped up a pancake using only masa instead: The ingredient increasingly appeared at new bakeries in the city, especially as heirloom corn became more readily available. Garcia hadn’t gotten to properly test the tweaked recipe beforehand, so she offered it for free. The masa pancake, which uses heirloom corn from Masienda (which supplies to restaurants like Cosme), was such a hit that Garcia and Rodriguez scrapped the earlier version. As seasons change, they’ve rotated in blueberries, apples, and so on as the compote topper. Currently, it’s a sour cherry-coriander-orange flavor.
Garcia didn’t envision it as the “star dish” of her restaurant, which also flips to dinner service. But now, it’s the most popular item on the breakfast menu. In the morning, “we do around 50 tables, 50 pancakes,” she says of her slender spot.
If pancakes define Cocina Consuelo at the start, at Hen House, they help keep the lights on.
In November, Antony Nassif, the chef-owner of the Lebanese East Village counter-service spot, launched a brunch menu with the knafeh pancake — an interpretation of the crunchy Middle Eastern pastry dessert filled with cheese. With increased interest, it’s now offered at all hours throughout the week.
He takes the shreds of kataifi (the shredded pastry dough), places them in a pan with butter, adds a buttermilk-semolina batter, puts the cheese on it (a mix of Palestinian Akkawi cheese, mozzarella, cheese curds; the latter, because he’s from Montreal), cooks it on one side in the oven, and then flips it like it were maklouba, leaving the top crisp. It’s finished with blueberries and maple-rose syrup. The nickname is panefeh.
Earlier this month, he posted a vulnerable Instagram post, stating that he had just $10 left in his bank account and that the restaurant was at risk of closing. In response, fans flooded the restaurant for creative dishes like his knafeh pancake. “I always wanted to do something with knafeh and pancakes are something that people show up for,” says Nassif. He likes “making wild dishes” to keep customers interested — and for himself, too. “There are so many restaurants and new hot spots, to stay relevant, if a restaurant doesn’t have anything on Instagram, you’re going to die off because of the attention span,” he says.
“I was really hoping the pancakes would save the restaurant. It was really horrible a few weeks ago, I didn’t know how I was going to pay my staff. I thought to myself, we have this following, let’s use it,” he says. He’s not out of the red yet, but the surge has been a Band-Aid. An artist even turned the knafeh pancake into a poster to help raise funds for Hen House.
The phrase “pancakes for the table” has become somewhat of a meme for those of us who are treats-motivated. So it’s no surprise that those pancakes have become a star of the table. A part of the menu since 2016, the pancakes at Sunday in Brooklyn — pudgy and dripping with hazelnut maple praline — became synonymous with an earlier era of Instagram food, though the restaurant still averages an estimated 40,000 sold per year. The double-stack is the most popular option, typically ordered for the table as dessert to round out brunch.
Souped-up pancakes are a hedge against the belief that you can just make brunch at home. Anyone can make a decent enough flapjack. But an over-the-top pancake? That’s what going out is for.
Increasingly, pancakes allow restaurants to flex personality at brunch and beyond. Dipping into personal heritage, Sam Yoo, at his Lower East Side Golden Diner, took cues from salty South Korean honey-butter chips. Pancakes like his — and those at Hen House and Cocina Consuelo — prove that the American breakfast staple can benefit from a bold upgrade.
At Hen House, Nassif takes a dessert and transforms it into breakfast. But what about turning breakfast into dessert? A couple of years ago, New York saw the rise of the photogenic Japanese souffle pancake trend, which kept going with spots like Flipper’s and Rule of Thirds, a Japanese Greenpoint spot that’s a sibling to Sunday in Brooklyn.
Now, there’s a new pancake souffle in town that keeps to Americana. Since Jeremy Salamon opened Pitt’s earlier in January, his buzzy Red Hook follow-up to Agi’s Counter, a pancake souffle has become an early standout, served for dessert. It requires a certain level of pancake devotion and lock-in from those who can’t usually make up their minds: Like any souffle, it must be ordered at the beginning of the meal because it takes about 40 minutes to make.
Head baker Goldie Flavelle now finds herself on souffle duty each night: The restaurant has been selling around one order of the $22 dessert per table so far: They sell so many that they are the only restaurant in the city (maybe even the country?) to distribute headsets to front-of-house members with the express purpose of communicating when to fire on the fragile jiggly dessert. (Done at the wrong moment, there’s potential for the souffle to sag.)
Pitt’s is, as Salamon describes it, a “restaurant-themed” restaurant, so the souffle is a similar ruse to other details, like a complimentary bread basket that kicks off the meal. Like any proper souffle, it arrives puffing out of a ramekin, its top dusted with powdered sugar. After it’s scored, a server pours maple syrup in the center. It’s a souffle, yes. But, Flavelle says, “it tastes just like a pancake.”
