1. Choco-Toffee Cookie. The unanimous winner of our cookie tasting comes from a tiny bakery in the East Village, where they incorporate an almost imperceptible amount of toffee into their dough. That sweetness, plus a sprinkle of Maldon salt on top, balance out the shards of bittersweet chocolate beautifully. The only downside to this cookie is that once you have one, you’ll compare every future cookie you eat to it.

2. Sea Salt Chocolate Chip. As far as the classic thin chocolate chip cookie goes, The Pastry Box—also in the East Village—does the best we tried. And actually, they do two—a medium cookie and a frisbee-like “1/4 pound” one that would make a great gift. Other than the size difference, both contain rich, fruity chocolate. They're both wispy thin and crunchy on the edges, with enough resistance for a nice center chew.

3. Malted Flour Chocolate Chip Cookie. Winner’s cookie brings to mind a malted milkshake at a state fair in summer. That's probably because this Park Slope bakery uses malt flour in their delightfully chewy cookies, which have chocolate peeking through the cracks of their golden brown exteriors.

4. Amba Caramel Chocolate Chip Cookie. Sticky, salty, and thin as fruit leather, the cookie from Edith’s Sandwich Counter looks and tastes like it was made by someone who’s never actually seen a cookie. It’s a non-traditional, translucent tour de force, with an amba-caramel glaze that imparts just a whisper of mango flavor. One is never sufficient. Thankfully, they’re sold in pairs.

5. Chocolate Chip Cookie. This Upper East Side institution (with locations on the Upper West Side and Long Island) bakes a beautifully browned cookie, combining a very crunchy, caramelized bottom with a surprisingly soft and chewy interior. Orwashers’ straightforward cookie proves there’s no need to reinvent the chocolate chip wheel.

6. Sea Salt Chocolate Chip Cookie. Though they’re better known for their elaborate cakes, From Lucie in the East Village bakes up a mean chocolate chip cookie. It’s on the sweeter side—in part due to the use of both dark and milk chocolate chunks—but we like the variation in texture across the wide, thin cookie with a sprinkling of flaky salt.

7. Housemade Lard Chocolate Chip Cookie. This cookie tastes like pepperoni. But it sort of makes us want all our future chocolate chip cookies to taste like pepperoni too. There’s a richness and saltiness to this Prospect Heights butcher shop cookie that we haven’t found anywhere else. Plus, we don’t know of any other shop where you can grab some homemade sausage along with your dessert.

8. Chocolate Chip Cookie. The chocolate chip cookie from this Vietnamese-American bakery in Two Bridges is a masterclass in Not Too Sweet (they even sell merch with that slogan). The cookie's dark chocolate chunks, crispy-crunchy edges, and heavy sprinkling of flaky salt are truly special, and it pairs very well with their citrusy Lime Drip coffee.

9. Triple Chocolate Chunk. Hani’s makes a particularly pretty chocolate chip cookie. Silver dollar-sized puddles of melted-then-solidified dark chocolate take up most of the surface area, and the rest is filled out by a dark cookie. It’s wonderful—rich, a little bit sour, and with a great depth of flavor from the mix of flours.

10. Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookie Au Sel De Mer. The tahini in this cookie is so subtle it’s like it’s not even there. That’s not a dig, just an observation. Mostly what you taste are the abundant milk chocolate chips and crystalline planks of sea salt scattered across the top. Bonus points for the buttery personality and exceptionally crunchy bottom.

11. Chocolate Chip Cookie. A restaurant that shares space with one of NYC’s most elegant (and least affordable) home goods stores produces—unsurprisingly—a flawlessly round cookie. Topped with clusters of coarse sea salt, La Mercerie’s version is dense and nutty (despite a lack of nuts), with a well-browned crust and a molten interior. An impressive piece of engineering.

12. Chocolate Chunk Cookie. Like many of the offerings at Dominique Ansel—the croissant, the Cronut—the cookies at this Soho bakery are uniformly delicious. They look just like the cookie emoji, with soft pools of milk and dark chocolate and a smooth interior, but they’re not overly sweet.

13. Caramel Chocolate Chunk Cookie. This excellent cookie might just unseat the cruller as our favorite grab-and-go treat at Daily Provisions. There’s a good contrast between the gooey center and crispy circumference, as well as the mix of milk and dark chocolate, but the biggest selling point is the smudges of chewy caramel throughout.

14. Chocolate Chunk Cookie. This Greenpoint bakery, with a second location in Prospect Heights, does many things very well. Their gorgeous chocolate chip cookie is one of them. It has formidable salt flakes and streaks of dark chocolate, but the texture is ultimately more exciting than the flavor—alternatingly chewy and crunchy with every bite.

15. Chocolate Chip. A warm cookie from this Garment District coffee shop (with a couple nearby locations) is a real pleasure—and more than one of us suspected that Culture Espresso would take home the crown in our taste test. A few hours into its lifespan, the cookie is still delicious, even if it’s lost some of that sublime fresh-out-the-oven magic. They’re buttery, with generous melty chocolate and a sugary crust.

16. Chocolate Chip Cookie. This Noho bakery’s cookie shares DNA with the ones at Levain: thick and studded with big chocolate chunks. It’s not really what this place is known for—the sugar cookies painted to look like MetroCards and Meryl Streep steal the spotlight—but if you like a cookie that’s roughly the size of a softball, this might be the one for you. Funny Face has another location in FiDi.

17. Chocolate Chip Cookie. Almost the exact dimensions of a hockey puck, this uniformly cylindrical cookie from Petit Chou in the East Village is a bit jarring at first glance. But a bite of the gooey center and crunchy outsides will ease your mind. The generous striations of chocolate throughout don't hurt either.

18. Maman's Nutty Chocolate Chip Cookie. If you love nuts in your chocolate chip cookie, Maman’s might be the one for you. It’s laden with walnuts, almonds, and macadamia. There are also interesting, unexpectedly bitter notes to this crunchy, well-browned, and densely chocolatey cookie. It’s definitely one of the more sophisticated options in town.

19. Jacques' Famous Chocolate Chip Cookies. This thin, crackly specimen is ideal for those who wish their cookies were less cookie and more chip. It’s made with rich, dark Belgian chocolate, in a helping as generous as you’d expect from a pastry chef who goes by “Mr. Chocolate.”

20. Chocolate Chip Walnut Cookie. Another nut-forward cookie, from Chelsea coffee shop Yanni’s. These dark, reddish-brown chocolate chip cookies are walnut-heavy and shaped by hand, which results in a shape that can only be described as a rustic lump. Satisfying, but definitely on the sweeter side.

21. Nori Chocolate Chip. The most intriguing cookie in our tasting—with strips of nori ribboning through the milk and dark chocolate—and the most divisive. The umami-sweet aftertaste and caramelized sugar bitterness aren’t for everyone, but if you like unusual pairings, definitely check out Elbow’s cookie for yourself. In terms of thickness and size, it hits a perfect middle mark, and there’s some great crisp-to-soft action as you move from the sides to the center.

22. Chocolate Chunk. Let’s put it this way: no one’s going to turn away a box of warm Insomnia cookies at 3am. And the goods from this chain with over 20 late-night locations across the city hold up surprisingly well. They’re crisp on the outside, soft in the middle, and it they're a little too sweet it's in a way that feels comfortingly reminiscent of being a kid.

23. Classic Chocolate Chip Cookie. On sight, this soft, thick cookie without much surface texture didn’t make the strongest first impression. But we do love the aggressive ratio of smooth, semi-liquid chocolate to crumbly dough. It must be approaching 50/50. And we hear the vegan version is just as good.

24. Chocolate Chip Walnut. Outside of Toll House, Chips Ahoy, and Doubletree hotels, Levain makes the most iconic chocolate chip cookie in America. This was one of few we could identify on sight during our tasting. Think of this polarizing but fiercely beloved cookie as you would a deep-dish pizza: a genre all its own. It looks like a thick scone, with a craggy top and a borderline underbaked, cake-like interior. For most of us, this style simply isn’t our ideal cookie, but there’s no denying Le

25. Too Much Chocolate Cookie. As advertised, the cookie at this Park Slope bakery has an impressive amount of chocolate in it—possibly more chocolate than cookie. Break it in half and you can see the stacked layers. It’s a cookie for people who pick the chocolate chips out of their muffins, and if that’s you, seek this one out.

26. Burdick Cookie. Soho chocolatier L.A. Burdick does an exemplary hot chocolate. Their chocolate chip cookie, on the other hand, is fine. The dark chocolate, vanilla, and bits of walnut do what they can, and we certainly wouldn't turn one away, but overall it’s a snooze.

27. Black Emmer Chocolate Chip Cookie. From an East Harlem bakery that mills their own flour, this is the most unusual chocolate chip cookie on our list, especially in terms of texture. All the fibrous bits of black emmer wheat gives it the graininess of a puffed cereal crispie, and there’s a marshmallow sweetness too. The abundance of kiss-shaped chips keep it in cookie territory though.

28. The Classic. This quirky Hell’s Kitchen bakery offers more than 100 rotating cookie varieties (many of them with Broadway show tie-ins), but their chocolate chip is—as promised—classic, with chunks of semi-sweet chocolate and a light sprinkling of sea salt. It’s solid, if unimaginative, and has a slightly sandy texture.

29. Chocolate Chip. Chip City’s thick, gooey chocolate chip cookie could easily be split into more than one sitting, though we’re not positive we’d like to eat it again so soon. This is best suited for the cookie connoisseur who enjoys a cakier, squishier experience, and one that’s relatively light on chocolate—preferences that most of us happen not to share, but to each their own.

30. Tahini Chocolate Chip. Kudos for trying something different, Librae, but this tahini chocolate chip cookie isn't our favorite. Still, it’s a very well made cookie. It’s tender, chewy, and the high-quality chocolate is apparent right away. But the tahini is overpowering, reminding some of us more of a mezze platter than a dessert.

31. Double Chocolate Chunk. When served warm, the vanilla fragrance wafting off this hefty cookie could lure us into traffic. Unfortunately, the smell is writing checks that the taste can't cash. Especially once it's reached room temperature, the cookie tastes too sweet and artificial, with poor-quality chocolate. We cannot in good conscience give it five big booms—that’s for the chicken bake.

32. Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chunk Cookie. This national chain with Pepto-pink branding and the charm of a walk-in medical clinic is a very easy target. We recognize this, but we still feel compelled to point out that Crumbl’s chocolate chunk cookie is unholy. No human could have made this. It’s too dry and sickly pale.