Latest New School Construction Update

The Union Square Partnership (which is our business improvement district) has come up with a sweeping five-point plan to help the neighborhood bounce back after COVID. Check it out.

It’s at this time of the year that street life returns to our sidewalks, and with it comes litter, especially on 13th St., where fans of Joe Coffee linger on our stoop, smoke up a storm, and drop their butts. Such is life in the big city. The big problem with this is that we sometimes get sanitation tickets that aren’t our fault. The Board of Directors has a very cordial relationship with Joe’s owner, Jonathan Rubenstein, who is a good guy and a great example of a successful local entrepreneur fighting off the big chains. He’s busy expanding his empire, but he does care and responds to our complaints. In the meantime, feel free to remind visitors to our stoop not to drop their trash, and if you have the time, call 311 to complain because city inspectors will get Joe’s attention.

Now baking at 64 University Place is Papa d’Amour, the new bakery from celebrated pastry master Dominique Ansel. It’s gonna be fancy. Here’s New York magazine’s take:

On a recent afternoon inside the kitchen that will open as Papa d’Amour later this month, the pastry chef Dominique Ansel was holding a spoonful of tomato-tinted scrambled eggs for the consideration of his wife, Amy Ma. “White pepper,” she said after trying it. “That’s not a bad thing.” She explained that Ansel will add vermicelli to the eggs to soak up any excess moisture so the mixture can then be stuffed inside a soft, steamed bao bun, which — because this is from the same chef who invented the Cronut all those years ago — will be folded in the shape of a croissant.

A single pastry that manages to reference a dim-sum staple, French patisserie, and the tomato-egg stir-fry that Ma’s mother cooked for her at home in Taiwan is but one of the many complex, globally collaged items on the menu of Papa d’Amour, which is Ansel’s “exploration” of Asian bread culture, as he puts it. More than that, it is a manifestation of love for his two children (the enfants to his papa) where customers will be able to find loaves of shokupan and sandwiches made on that Japanese milk bread (plain or laminated); pretzel-salt-crusted Chinese custard tarts; and a banana bread Malay cake derived not from the humble American home-baking staple but of Malaysia’s more elegant, fluffy, steamed sponge cake.

The Papa is particularly excited about a scallion-basil “blossom,” which, you’d never guess unless he told you, is his take on a Taiwanese scallion pancake. “I wanted something I can pull apart,” he says. He’d seen the way the pancake’s dough is fluffed by hand to give it a flaky, almost shredded surface and a chewy middle and wanted to come up with something that mimics that interplay. He was trained in France, so his mind went to two kinds of brioche: a regular version to encase the scallion component in the middle and a laminated, layered crown to encourage ripping.

Nostalgic dessert chain Milk Bar is opening its 10th New York City location Saturday, but this time with new menu items only available at this store near Union Square.

Located at 110 Fifth Ave. and 16th Street, this latest Milk Bar is a part of a new store called Camp, created to be “immersive” shopping for families. The 10,000-square-foot space has a camp theme that will change every eight to 12 weeks, with “base camp,” modeled after children’s summer camps, first up.

To fit into the camp theme, Milk Bar will have a sundae bar with a rotating special — starting off, appropriately, with a s’mores sundae of cereal milk soft serve topped with compost cookie crumbs, charred marshmallows, fudge sauce, and marshmallow sauce. The sundae bar also has very Milk Bar-esque topping options such has cornflake crunch, confetti cookie crumb, and blueberry corn. And Milk Bar classics — crack pie, corn cookie, birthday cake truffles — fill out the rest of the menu, in full below. There’s also Counter Culture coffee.

Next week (June 24 to June 28), material and equipment deliveries and installation work will continue on all floors inside the building. Additionally we will be working on the roofs of the building.
The following week (July 1 to July 5), material and equipment deliveries and installation work will continue on all floors as well as sidewalk work.

The downtown location of popular vegan restaurant Blossom is out after two years. The team announced the closure of their University Place outpost in an Instagram post, saying that they were “grateful for the chance to focus our energies and resources on our flagship Upper West Side location.”