LeyRa Chocolate Brings Sweet Belgium Serendipity to Greenwich Village

LeyRa Chocolate is a small storefront on MacDougal Street with three chocolate fountains and a matrix of sweet permutations across waffles, crepes, fruit dips and cream puffs, plus (kinda randomly) a few pasta options.

I went to LeyRa for a late afternoon waffle-siesta last weekend and was impressed by my delicious, fresh and photogenic dark-chocolate drizzled Lotus cookie waffle. I ordered the same cookie waffle today, varying the order slightly with white chocolate instead of dark-chocolate, and was equally delighted.

The warm Belgium chocolate enhances the waffles’ natural fluffiness, making the buttery bread even more tender to the fork. An abundance of crushed Lotus cookies add entertaining cinnamon-spice mouth-feel to each bite, and however you choose to spread or plop on the scoop of vanilla ice cream - which comes served separately in a plastic cup - you’ve got yourself a truly decadent dessert.

My only minor qualm, which I also raised with the friendly cashier / server, was the cookie waffle could have gone maximalist with the speculoos theme and used a smear of cookie butter.

I firmly believe speculoos ought to be as ubiquitous in American desserts as cookies-and-cream or cookie dough. A scroll through Australian and European Insta feeds confirms our savvier international allies are deliciously riffing on Biscoff across a variety of formats, from burgers to blondies.

The LeyRa representative kindly accepted my recommendation, noting that their Belgium cookie crepe makes use of a Biscoff topping sauce. Guess I’ll be getting their crepe next time!

In either case, LeyRa’s beautiful, delicious cookie waffle deserves props as it stands. Allow me to switch to a 10-point scale system switching and grant LeyRa’s cookie waffle an 8.2 out of 10.

A strong score, LeyRa, and liable to go even higher with more cookie butter.

Until next time.