Levain Bakery

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Newport Beach shopping mall Fashion Island was a well-liked restaurant destination, buoyed by the popularity of SoCal chains such as California Pizza Kitchen, The Cheesecake Factory, and P.F. Chang’s. But in recent years, these places have vanished from the mall and given way to numerous mediocre American-ish options, a trend only modestly offset by the opening of an actually great Spanish restaurant, Telefèric Barcelona, in August 2026. Less than a month later, Telefèric had a new neighbor from the other side of the Atlantic: Levain Bakery, a three-decade-old chain that says it sells “New York City’s most famous cookies.”

With 10 locations in New York and roughly a dozen spread across seven other states and Washington DC, Levain offers freshly baked confections alongside sweet and savory loaves of bread, a few sandwiches, and basic cafe-style drinks. To create the impression of overwhelming demand, Levain queues customers outdoors in snaking lines managed by stancions and employees. The lines were originally ridiculous but had substantially died down two weeks after opening, revealing that their primary reason for being was a lack of any seating inside Levain. On our visit, purchasers carried take-out bags to communally available tables outside or their cars; wise customers skipped lining up entirely by ordering from Levain’s website beforehand.

Eight different cookie choices go for around $6.50 each, an even more princely sum per cookie than similarly oversized and flavored options we’ve loved at locally owned chain Paderia Bakehouse. We sampled four of Levain’s flavors – the Two Chip Chocolate Chip, Caramel Coconut Chocolate Chip, Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip, and Black & White – while skipping Dark Chocolate Chocolate Chip, Oatmeal Raisin, and both regular and gluten-free versions of Chocolate Chip Walnut. As might be obvious, almost all of the cookies are for fans of chocolate or chocolate chips.

While Levain’s cookies struck us as better than anything we’ve tried at similarly faddy, Utah-based chain Crumbl Cookies, they generally weren’t as good as Paderia’s – typically drier, with a shallower depth of flavor in both of the dark chocolate cookies we ordered. Putting aside the need to pay rent at a Newport Beach mall, we couldn’t point to any gourmet touches across the cookie dough, baking, or finishing of these cookies that made them worth their relatively high asking prices, though fans of extra-dark chocolate may appreciate that particular ingredient in the otherwise forgettable, limited-time Black & White.