The Best Pancakes In NYC

This Viennese cafe is on the first floor of the Neue Gallery, across the street from Central Park. Breakfast is our favorite meal here, and it always starts either with a kaffe krème or an einspänner. If you’re a sweet breakfast person, get an order of Kaisershmarren, a fluffy caramelized pancake that gets chopped up and served with roasted fruit.

We are confident in our belief that these are the best pancakes in Brooklyn. They're fried in a cast-iron skillet, so they have a heavy char on them, and they come topped with some magical type of extra-buttery butter and tons of maple syrup. Your goal for this weekend should be to eat these. Just be sure to make a reservation. On Saturdays and Sundays, this homey Greenpoint restaurant gets packed with pancake-seekers and millennial parents who have exceedingly well-dressed children.

Kenny Shopsin’s cult-favorite ’80s hangout lives on in Essex Market, and no matter what time of day you’re here, there should be some kind of pancake on your table. In the “Pancakeland” section of the menu, you’ll find more or less straightforward options like chocolate chip, blueberry, and mac and cheese (which is straightforward for Shopsin’s). Then there are the special and extra-special pancakes, the pancake sandwiches, the ebelskivers, and finally, the famous Slutty Pancakes, which are stuffed with things like hatch chile and chorizo mac and cheese.

Waiting in an endless line to eat the pancakes at Clinton St. Baking Company is a New York City rite of passage. It’s the kind of thing you do in the first six months of living here, but it’s also the kind of thing that’s nice to revisit every few years just to see if the sparkle is still there. This place is loud, unreasonably busy, and kind of annoying, but the pancakes are truly top-notch. They’re fluffy, basic, and delicious.

We find that a reverential hush tends to fall over the table when the honey butter pancakes are served at Golden Diner. They’re absurdly fluffy, with a crisp, caramelized exterior, but our favorite part is the honey maple butter rapidly melting all over them. You can add berry compote for $4, which might sound like a lot—especially on top of the $15 you’re already paying for these two bad boys—but you should do it. Along with the lemon zest that already tops the pancakes (which are, hallelujah, available all day), the tartness of the fruit really makes them sing.

Everything on the breakfast menu at this bright yellow-and-blue Mexican restaurant in Hamilton Heights is great, but the incredible masa pancake is the dish you’ll keep flashing back to all day. Get one for the table—it’s fluffier than a freshly dried towel, with gently crisped edges. The huge pancake is drenched through with not-too-sweet honey butter and topped with homemade cherry compote, and pairs well with a chilled café de olla (sweetened with piloncillo) or an iced pineapple espresso.

The most important reason to book a brunch reservation at Raoul's is because it's the easiest way to snag one of their elusive, incredible burgers au poivre, which have limited availability on weekdays. The second-most important reason is to order a soufflé pancake. This isn't the gravity-defyingly fluffy Japanese style (see Taiyaki below), but something closer to the offspring of a pancake and a banana tarte tatin, with a pleasantly salty toffee sauce and a beautiful caramelized exterior. The soufflé pancake at Raoul's takes about 25 minutes to prepare, so plan on enjoying your burger first.

With its terracotta floor and ancient-looking wooden ceiling beams, this Williamsburg spot is probably what George Clooney’s second home in Italy looks like. You can get a lot of brunch-y things like avocado toast and shakshuka here, but the malted pancakes stand out as the “one of these things is not like the other” dish. They have a muffin-like texture and come with a slightly salty hazelnut maple praline topping that you spread like a jam. Pancakes hadn’t reached their full potential until these came along.

Lemon ricotta pancakes are everywhere, but Locanda Verde is one of the spots that made this now-ubiquitous breakfast item popular. Their fluffy ricotta pancakes have a crisp exterior and come stacked with layers of lemon curd in between them, like a birthday cake you can eat for breakfast.

Another lemon-ricotta option, these are pretty different from the ones you’ll find at Locanda Verde. This Noho restaurant’s pancakes are very light, and the lemon flavor is infused directly into the batter. They come topped with a sticky-sweet berry compote that’s so good, you don’t really need syrup.

This all-day cafe in the West Village is a popular import from LA known for its oatmeal griddle cakes, which look like pancakes but are pre-sweetened and served without syrup. The griddle cakes come in varieties like blueberry, banana nut, and chocolate chip, and they're thin and crispy, with a moist consistency reminiscent of undercooked muffin batter. We're fans. As is the case for a lot of breakfast spots (especially in this neighborhood), you should get here early to avoid having to stand in line too long.

This quaint restaurant in Dumbo (or, technically, Vinegar Hill) has a smallish dining room and, we wouldn’t be surprised if the building was around when the founding fathers were still alive. If you come here for brunch without ordering their sourdough pancake, you just wasted a trip. The pancake is cooked in a wood-fired oven, and it’s custard-like in the middle and might come with strawberries, apples, or peaches depending on the season. (No matter what it comes with, just get it.)

You can’t talk about pancakes in NYC without talking about the impossibly jiggly, fluffy, magical soufflé pancakes at Taiyaki. They practically disappear the moment you take a bite and come drenched in matcha sauce and topped with a cute little mini taiyaki. They’re only available on weekends, which is our only complaint about these pancakes. 

If a restaurant connected to a high-end gym franchise isn’t your first choice for a cool night out, you might want to reconsider. Electric Lemon, the rooftop hotspot perched atop the Equinox Hotel in Hudson Yards, is actually pretty great. The flaxseed pancakes here (available on weekends) are exceptionally fluffy and get a pleasant textural contrast from the seeds strewn throughout the batter. The pancakes aren’t very sweet, but they pair very nicely with maple syrup.