Best of New York 2009 • Eating

• Momofuku Ssäm Bar

  207 Second Ave., at 13th St.; 212-254-3500

  For a restaurant empire that everyone likes to label Asian, Momofuku covers a lot of regional American ground. Case in point: the killer biscuits and gravy on Ssäm Bar’s new weekend brunch menu. Like many winning dishes, this one was born at a family meal, when a cook named Gabe resuscitated his Atlanta family’s biscuit recipe. The special Momofuku touch, though, comes from the rendered pork-jowl fat baked into them. That, and the country-ham scraps enriching the gravy, and the slices of savory ham-hock terrine that are toasted onto one half of the biscuit before it’s piled with tremulously soft eggs stirred with crème fraîche over almost imperceptible heat.

From the 2009 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine