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New York has a way of taking two things it already loves and mashing them together until the result feels inevitable. Cronuts. Everything bagel ice cream. Now, apparently, bread pudding made from babka.
The latest hybrid to emerge from the city’s culinary imagination comes from Zabar's. The Upper West Side institution is leaning into its dessert legacy with a new offering that feels both nostalgic and just indulgent enough to justify a spring dinner party: babka bread pudding.
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The concept is exactly what it sounds like. Thick slices of Zabar’s famously rich babka—arguably the gold standard in a city obsessed with the swirled Eastern European classic—are transformed into a custardy bread pudding. The result is a dessert that doubles down on decadence, with ribbons of chocolate or cinnamon baked into soft, buttery pudding, all topped with a crumbly streusel finish.
In other words, it’s what might happen if your grandmother’s bread pudding spent a semester abroad.
The new dessert arrives fully baked and ready to heat and serve, which is either convenient or dangerous depending on how much self-control you possess. Available in both chocolate and cinnamon versions, it’s designed to slide seamlessly into the kinds of occasions that define New York entertaining, from weekend brunches to casual holiday gatherings.
Even better, the $12.98 dessert is available for shipping nationwide on Zabar's website.
For the uninitiated, babka itself has long been one of the city’s great baked goods, one that has experienced something of a renaissance across the city’s bakeries, though Zabar’s version remains one of the most recognizable.
Turning it into bread pudding feels like a necessary next step. After all, bread pudding was historically invented to rescue stale bread, and babka rarely lasts long enough to reach that stage in most New York kitchens.
The real genius here may be the timing. As spring entertaining season ramps up—Easter brunches, Passover-adjacent dessert tables and the first warm-weather dinner parties—having a dessert that looks homemade but requires little more than reheating is its own kind of luxury.
And if it happens to involve molten chocolate babka in custard form, well, that’s just good planning.