Levain Bakery opens in Rittenhouse, bringing its whopping cookies from NYC

Starting today, Philadelphians will have easy access to the warm, gooey, softball-sized cookies that made New York City’s Levain Bakery a destination: The Upper West Side-born bakery opens its 15th location at 8 a.m. at 1518 Walnut St. in Rittenhouse.

While Philly has no shortage of giant cookies (for two excellent local renditions, check out Mighty Bread’s rye chocolate chip or Manna Bakery’s Arabic coffee-olive oil cookie), Levain’s is a welcome addition to Rittenhouse. And it’ll be a good option for both early-morning and late-night indulgences thanks to the bakery’s expansive hours, from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, starting Saturday.

Levain is the latest in an influx of cookie-centric out-of-towners to open in Philly: Utah-originated Crumbl Cookies has locations in Jenkintown, Bensalem, Broomall, Newtown Square, and more; Queens, N.Y.-based Chip City recently opened, also in Rittenhouse; Southern California’s Cookie Plug opened in Media this summer; and Lancaster County’s Taylor Chip plans to open soon in Fishtown and Rittenhouse.

Founded by Pam Weekes and Connie McDonald nearly 30 years ago, Levain was initially bread-focused (the bakery’s name refers to the French term for sourdough). Cookies weren’t on the menu when they opened the original 74th Street basement bakery in 1995. It wasn’t until a couple weeks in that McDonald happened to put out a tray of the six-ounce chocolate chip walnut cookies that she and Weekes typically made for themselves, friends, and family. The business partners and fellow triathletes had been baking them for several years, “mostly as rewards,” McDonald says.

“I was just in the bakery one afternoon alone and I think we had finished the production for the next day and I just thought, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll just bake a batch of the cookies that we always make, you know, and at least we’ll have them if we don’t sell them,‘" McDonald remembers.

Cookies quickly became the backbone of the business, though McDonald points out that customers were incensed when Levain opened a cookie-only Harlem location in 2010. “By that point, we thought no one really cared about the bread anymore,” McDonald says. “We were just going to make cookies and you wouldn’t believe the reaction that we got. People were so upset that their favorite bread items weren’t there."

Philly is the sixth city Levain has expanded to since a private equity firm took a majority stake in the company in 2019. It first branched beyond New York in 2020, opening a store in D.C. It added a second location in the D.C. suburbs the following year, then moved to Boston in 2022, followed by Chicago and L.A. in 2023. Besides the Rittenhouse store, the company has two more stores in the works, in Venice Beach and Boston’s Seaport neighborhood.

Weekes and McDonald scouted out Philly last year. They declined to say what other Philly neighborhoods were in the running for a Levain location — mainly to preserve the element of surprise should they decide to open a second location in the city.

Levain signed a lease on the former bank at 1518 Walnut St. last summer and transformed the space — most recently a menswear store — into a 3,900-square-foot bakery, complete with a fleet of rotating-rack bakery ovens. Thirty employees will keep the Philadelphia location well-stocked. The shop also has custom mural and Liberty Bell-branded Levain tote bags.

You can bank on Rittenhouse’s Levain having a line, mostly for the cookies, which go for $5.25 a pop (the seasonal cookie, currently a ginger- and nutmeg-infused chocolate chunk cookie made with molasses, goes for $5.75). But there are other reasons to stop at the bakery, including coffee and fresh-baked boules, baguettes, and brioche. Weekes and McDonald say they enjoy slices of Levain’s chocolate chip banana bread smeared with peanut butter, and ciabatta paired with olive oil and a glass of wine.

“We don’t want people to think of us as a cookie bakery. We want people to think of us as a neighborhood bakery,” Weekes said.