Best Bite: June 2025

Challah. Honey. Bun.

In 2015, when Sadelle’s first opened in New York, I was deeply (some might say unhealthily) obsessed with the salted caramel sticky buns.

Those sticky buns, developed by the legendary pastry chef Melissa Weller, are no longer on the menu at Sadelle’s. You can make them yourself though, as I did once during the pandemic, by following the recipe from Melissa’s bible of a cookbook, A Good Bake.

If you don’t want to spend hours folding butter into brioche to make Melissa’s perfect sticky buns (the process takes a while but it’s a labor of love! I found the whole thing to be extremely cathartic, not to mention gratifying and fun), go to Elbow Bread on Ludlow Street and get a challah honey bun instead.

The incredible baker Zoë Kanan teamed up with the duo behind Court Street Grocers, Eric Finkelstein and Matt Ross, to open Elbow last fall. I finally made it there for the first time earlier this month, and I *will* be back for the turkey sandwich and a potato knish. This go-around, I loved the garlic bread bialy and signature pretzel (that grainy mustard 🤤), but the challah honey bun really stood out.

After taking my first bite, I literally said to my friend Liz, “Oh my god, this tastes like the old sticky buns at Sadelle’s.” The sticky buns at Sadelle’s were more caramel-forward in flavor though, whereas the challah honey buns at Elbow lean into the sweet, tangy taste of caramelized honey. Zoë’s challah buns are gooey and flaky at the same time, not unlike Melissa’s sticky buns, and both are the kind of pastry that you can’t eat without making a bit of a mess. (The good kind.)

I had totally forgotten that Zöe worked under Melissa at Sadelle’s. Once I remembered, several days later, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Zöe found herself inspired at all by those iconic sticky buns. (In his New York Times review of Sadelle’s, Pete Wells referred to them as “phenomenal, swirls of laminated brioche dough under a brown-sugar glaze.”)

The similarities are there if you want to see them, but Zöe’s lacquered little loaf—a miniature challah that fits in the palm of your hand—is a baked good in a league of its own.