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The Infatuation
The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies In Seattle, Ranked
By Aimee Rizzo,
1 day ago
The chocolate chip cookie is a pastry that has gotten a lot of love since its invention in the 1930s. And when taking a look at Seattle’s robust showing, there are many qualities to judge them on—surface anatomy, chip distribution, compatibility with cold milk, and ability to conjure feelings of snow days and childhood bake sales. But the most important metric is: Does it taste any good? We conducted a taste test with chocolate chippers from 25 different bakeries to jumpstart the decision-making. Check out our favorites below, and if you need us, we’ll be booking a dentist appointment.
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No rating: This is a restaurant we want to re-visit before rating, or it’s a coffee shop, bar, or dessert shop. We only rate spots where you can eat a full meal.
At this Ballard German- and Chinese-inspired coffee shop, Seattle’s best chocolate chip cookie is hiding in plain sight. It’s not the simplest—and yet, all of the elements work together flawlessly like a well-constructed Rube Goldberg machine. The edges are sandie-crisp while the middle is nougat-soft. Cardamom adds baking-spice warmth. Chocolate chunks ooze like thick Nutella. And salted licorice caramel creates a toffee-like brittle around the perimeter. We know that anise stuff can be polarizing, but there’s just enough to impart some herbal pizzazz without feeling like you swan-dove into a swimming pool of black Red Vines.
We’re not surprised that the folks behind the best bagels in town also produce a phenomenal chocolate chip cookie. The sole sweet pastry option at Mt. Bagel is almost a carbon copy of Otis Spunkmeyer’s. In other words, it’s the platonic ideal of a chocolate chip cookie, with a center that’s equally as cakey as it is gooey, and melty semi-sweet chips that do their job adequately without making it all about them (those selfish divas).
Meet the chocolate chip cookie for the people. The crowd-pleasing one at this Woodinville cafe is soft and supple, with a higher-than-usual amount of solidified chocolate chips that become one with the crumb, as well as barely-there toasted edges that melt instead of snap. It’s buttery-rich but not over the top, and you could easily slam it as an after-lunch snack without immediately needing a nap. Essentially, if you don’t like this chocolate chip cookie, you don’t like chocolate chip cookies.
Sure, this bakery in the U-District is called Saint Bread, but we’d like to submit their salty brown butter chocolate chip cookie for sainthood consideration, too. (Ball’s in your court, Pope.) The chocolate is so dark that it registers as fruity, with an even distribution between larger shards and smaller shavings—and there’s a distinct dough tang that nearly tastes yeasted. We can’t think of a better finale after inhaling a bacon-egg-and-cheese on sugar-dusted melonpan.
Thoroughly audible crunch and the presence of enough oats to be a horse’s breakfast would typically book any cookie a one-way ticket to the trash can. But Sea Wolf’s gloriously clunky puck is the exception to the rule. The way this hefty disc balances nutty brown butter, dark chocolate, and a heavy hand of sea salt gets us on board with its rock-hard texture quickly—and even makes us want to host a cookie convention and invite them as the keynote speakers. Their chat would touch on disrupting the industry, of course.
Not to worry, citizens—Metropolitan Market made the cut. With a walnut-studded grocery store behemoth so iconic it’s literally called “The Cookie,” we can’t help but adore the thing. Whether ripped into fresh from the warmers or via takeout cup of diced hunks, there’s a decadent onslaught of drippy chocolate, a tacky center, roasty nuts, and craggy crunch bits across the top, available at all 10 Metropolitan Market locations across the Greater Seattle Area. Long live The Cookie.
Regardless of how you feel about caramel in a chocolate chip cookie, Ben’s Bread’s is a stellar example. At first glance, things progress as expected—with silky Valrhona chunks, salt flakes, an earthy bump from a bit of buckwheat flour, and loads of sticky caramel that have pooled in some parts and bruleed in others. The result is a bittersweet, chewy little number that would perform beautifully as part of a Halloween treat bowl among the fun-sized Twix and Snickers.
Cornelly is not the only pizzeria in town with a chocolate chip cookie on offer, but it is the greatest. This salted post-pie dessert has plenty of chunks (but not too many if you’re into the chipless bites), a tender crackle on the outside, and a denseness in the middle that almost resembles cookie dough itself. That is, with none of the dangers of ingesting raw flour.
In the chocolate chip cookie universe, all-purpose flour is king. But Volunteer Park Cafe’s wheatless version proves that we don’t need it. Their gluten-free chocolate chunk cookie has a clean buckwheat-backed nuttiness, along with a salty dulce de leche-like texture that softly crumbles like kinetic sand. (Thank you, desiccated coconut.)
This Central District bakery’s chocolate chip cookie is like that friend who has it all together—you know, the one who goes on daily morning strolls and owns house plants that aren’t made of plastic. For starters, there’s pillowy softness backed by a caramelly crisp throughout the bottom like a New York-style pizza slice. And for some sophisticated bursts of crunch, you’ve also got cacao nibs thrown in, which temper some of that sweetness.
The dueling chocolate chip cookies at this Queen Anne bakery act as a choose-your-own-adventure. Pick one of them, and you’ll get flecks of ground espresso woven throughout the brown sugar for a buzzy-bitter caffeine boost. Go with the other, and find a large quantity of buckwheat instead. Both are excellent and incredibly worthy of sharing plate space with a cardamom horn or ham-and-cheese potato roll.
Brown butter is paramount when it comes to this Filipino cafe’s chocolate chip cookie—simply smelling one activates all that toasty golden confetti we know and love. The chip of choice here is miniature, with the occasional larger milk chocolate morsel there to cut through the teeny semi-sweet bric-a-brac. A tooth-sinking squishiness dominates the interior, making it a pretty choice candidate for an iced ube latte dunk.
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