Gourmet cookie, milk bar opening
Fort Lauderdale cookie monsters: There’s a new sheriff in town.
Batch, the Cookie Company, a new gourmet cookie purveyor from acclaimed pastry chef Max Santiago, will debut Aug. 31 inside Fort Lauderdale’s white-hot Flagler Village neighborhood.
Batch will occupy a 600-square-foot kitchen inside the Hive, a honeycomb of muralsplashed warehouses behind Searstown, doors down from recent arrivals such as Notorious Creamery and the Rec Room. When it opens, the shop will feature nine over-the-top softbaked cookies and a milk bar, along with a pick-up window catering to late-night cookie cravings.
For followers of Santiago’s sweet confections, Batch represents a cookie coup for Fort Lauderdale. The decorated chef (Valentino Cucina Italiana, Lure Fishbar) helped spark South Florida’s affair with gourmet (and liquor-spiked) doughnuts with a 24-hour-raised brioche recipe he created for Wynwood’s the Salty Donut. He also routinely competes on Food Network and Cooking Channel baking competition shows, such as “Best Baker in America” (semifinalist) and “Sugar Showdown,” which he won in 2016.
Pivoting from doughnuts to cookies took help from Fort Lauderdale business partners Adam August and Nick Hicks, who signed the lease last spring.
“I did the 18-hour workdays in big hotels, but I prefer zoning in on one product and making it the most amazing. That’s what I did with my doughnuts,” says Santiago, a 25-year chef veteran and graduate of the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. “These are going to be like insane monster cookies with chef-driven ingredients and homemade custards, curds and glazes.”
Santiago describes Batch as “standing-room-only” and “mostly a kitchen,” with a few outdoor patio tables and muralcovered walls. He picked the MASS District for its Wynwoodesque nightlife vibe and to avoid cookie-saturated Miami, already