Sunday Morning, NYC

Oh New York.  The city with amazing culinary options for whatever you seek out, including places devoted to mastering just one single thing.  Enter Sunday Morning, a bakery that makes cinnamon rolls.  Only cinnamon rolls (although, with many flavors).  In a city known to have plenty of great cinnamon rolls, this is a bit risky, but, most certainly seems to be working out for them.

It opened in January, and the media buzz has been fairly constant since.  The place is notorious for the lines (often 1-2 hours on weekends!) and for being all over Instagram and TikTok.  Even in a city with tons of cinnamon rolls, the hype is very, very real here.  They are open daily, but not until 10am on weekends (9am during the week), which really does seem sensible, as these aren't really breakfast items.

HUGE rolls!

"​​Our cinnamon rolls are made in the classic American style. A soft, pillowy, save-the-center-for-last kind of roll."

The menu has about 10 flavors rolls every day, starting with the basic classic cinnamon rolls with either sugar glaze or cream cheese frosting, or cinnabon like with caramel pecans, but quickly gets more fun from there.  On the fruity side, there is a blueberry lemon curd version with classic cream cheese frosting, a strawberry earl grey version, or even pineapple upside down with chantilly cream.  Pistachio lovers can go for the pistachio mascarpone, and for even more decadence, there is a brooklyn blackout with chocolate pudding (!) and a bananas foster with rum caramel and caramelized banana (not that the others are not decadent ...).  They sometimes have incredible sounding specials like Coconut Kaya Pandan, Ube, or Raspberry Honey Labneh.  Flavors are incorporated either into the icing, as garnish on top, or into the roll dough itself.  Rolls are $7 - $8.50 each and are all massive, so really quite reasonable prices.

When you visit the bakery in person, the buns are right there on the baking pans, hot and fresh from the oven, often warm as they bake them continuously throughout the day.  They don't bother put them into display cases, just, huge trays of very inviting rolls that make decision making impossible.  Or so I see from photos, I didn't visit myself, but rather, was treated to them by a friend who knows my love of baked goods.

My friend visited in person and ordered 4: the classic, the blueberry lemon curd, and these two (pistachio, earl gray). He devoured the first two on site so I didn't even see them, but brought me the others.  They aren't necessarily the flavors I would have picked, but I was more than happy to indulge and take them off his hands.

Strawberry Earl Grey / bergamot tea.

I started with the strawberry earl grey, as it has the bergamot tea in it, and thus a bit of caffeine, and I generally avoid caffeine after about 1pm.  

I didn't actually really taste the earl grey - I think it is incorporated into the frosting only?  It must have been very subtle, and masked by the other strong flavors (but I could see the flecks in the frosting).  What I did taste was quite enjoyable regardless - the cream cheese icing was generously applied, sweet, cream cheese-y, classic and just yup, done well.  The stewed strawberry topping was definitely sweet but in a natural and not cloying way, and went well with the frosting.  There was a lot of topping, definitely such that this was a dessert and not a breakfast sort of item, which was fine, as I was consuming it as after lunch dessert anyway.

The base cinnamon roll was exactly what I look for in a cinnamon roll.  It was lofty, soft, slightly almost underbaked in the middle but not really, and the edges weren't dried out or hard.  Rolled with classic cinnamon sugar filling, good amount of classic cinnamon flavor.  There was also bits of strawberry incorporated into the cinnamon roll dough itself.

Overall, at room temp, there is no question that this was a very good cinnamon roll, but I didn't find it actually life changing (and not something I'd personally wait in a loooong line for).  I enjoyed it even more when I warmed a hunk up and added a scoop of vanilla gelato.

Low 4/5 - I can't really fault anything (although perhaps not tasting the earl grey if I had cared about that), but not life changing, which may just be that I've had a lot of cinnamon rolls in my life, and they aren't as exciting to me these days as other desserts that I didn't grow up with my mom making from scratch? (Yes, I was spoiled by having a mother who baked regularly). 

Pistachio Mascarpone / pistachio butter.

Next up was the pistachio mascarpone.  I appreciated that it was not Dubai chocolate adjacent, as every other pistachio item in the city seems to be trending.

I liked this one even more.  Again the base cinnamon rolls was pretty much textbook well executed - moist, soft, lofty, fresh, etc.  It was smothered in pistachio mascarpone frosting, which was SOOOOOOO good.  Such strong real pistachio flavor, and I loved the crunch from all the bits of nut.  I didn't actually taste mascarpone in this, but it did have a creaminess to it that was more than just pistachio butter.

This is definitely a roll for pistachio lovers, and I thought it was excellent (and again, even better warm with ice cream/gelato)! 4/5, maybe 4.5/5.