Milk Bar is a chain of dessert and bakery restaurants owned by founding chef Christina Tosi and the Manhattan-based Momofuku restaurant group, though the Momofuku group does not control the operations of Milk Bar. Tosi is the primary creator of Milk Bar's products. Milk Bar makes custom wedding cakes, produces their own line of baking mixes, and ships baked goods all around the globe. They also offer weekly baking classes at their Williamsburg kitchen, the heart of Milk Bar's nine New York locations. They also have locations in Washington D.C., Boston, Las Vegas, and Toronto.
History
graduated from the French Culinary Institute’s pastry arts program, and began her career at upscale New York restaurants including Bouley and wd~50. Tosi started at Momofuku as a food safety consultant in 2005; at that time there were no dessert items on the menu. After Tosi brought in various unconventional homemade desserts, owner David Chang demanded she re-create them for a dinner service that evening. She soon became the pastry chef for all of Chang's Momofuku restaurants. When Momofuku Ssam Bar decided to expand into a neighboring vacant laundromat in 2008, Tosi proposed the idea to add a bakery. The first Milk Bar opened in November 2008, and began selling Tosi's "happy mistakes," including the compost cookie, the crack pie, and cereal milk. In December 2009, Anderson Cooper appeared on Regis and Kelly professing his love for Milk Bar and its Crack Pie. By 2012, Milk Bar had grown from one retail sales location in the East Village of Manhattan to nine retail outlets in New York City, one in Toronto, Ontario, three in Washington, D.C. one at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. and one in Los Angeles on Melrose Avenue. Tosi opened her first Boston-area store in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a partnership with &pizza, a Washington D.C.-based pizzeria chain. The Boston store was Tosi's 16th Milk Bar, and by February 2019, Milk Bar employed 381 people across North America.
Awards
Tosi received the James Beard Foundation award for Rising Star Chef of the Year for her work at the Milk Bar in 2012. Tosi followed up this award as a finalist for the 2014 Outstanding Pastry James Beard award for rising star chefs. In 2015, she received the James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef award.
Publications
The first book of recipes from the restaurant, by Tosi, was called Momofuku Milk Bar and released in October 2011. The second, again by Tosi, was called Milk Bar Life: Recipes & Stories and released in April 2015.
