For the Very Best Granola, Get to a Bakery

Granola a Culture, ready to go. Photo: Courtesy of Culture

On the Upper East Side, it’s easy to find the tiny gourmet store Madison Fare, since there’s usually a line stretching outside. Owner Amin Kinana can thank a viral frozen yogurt for that, but he says that for the two years he’s been open, he’s had a different best seller: granola. Kinana can barely keep it in stock, having just fulfilled a 12-bag order, and he says shipments to Massachusetts or Miami aren’t uncommon: “It has nothing to do with TikTok.” Instead, the support largely comes the old-fashioned way: A neighbor tries, loves it, and gets a gift for a friend. From there, the cycle continues.

Inside its opaque metallic bag, the granola — a colorful confetti of goji berries, hemp and pumpkin seeds, blueberries, almond-butter-coated oats, and strips of chewy orange and yuzu peel — makes an instant impression.

Each one-pound bag costs around $19, but in an era when Early Bird and Bear Naked are on every grocery shelf in America (and Instagram granola of course exists), there is still very much a market for very small-batch products like this. Granola is, after all, a baked good, and like any croissant or kouign-amann, it sings when it is fresh, and the various textures and flavors can fade as it sits in a bag on a supermarket shelf for days or even weeks.

My favorite granola as of late comes from the yogurt shop Culture, where co-owner Jenny Ammirati is constantly producing new batches, most of which end up sprinkled on top of frozen yogurt. Hers is almost candied with a brittle layer of honey and brown sugar coating the dark toasted oats, coconut flakes, and almonds, a mix that clumps but doesn’t cluster and is seasoned with just enough cinnamon to whisper in the background without competing with the fruit in a parfait. “Some recipes I make one time and they are perfect,” Ammirati says, but to achieve this granola, “I must have made 20 different versions.” During summer — peak Froyo season —she can’t make enough to sell extra, but the $9 16-ounce retail bags should reappear on the shelf by October.

Granola can also be a canvas for a point of view, like at Danish bakery Ole and Steen, which adds bits of its own toasted rye bread to the borderline-unsweet mix of pale flattened oats and sliced almonds that will appeal to any lover of bran flakes and would probably go very well on top of a squash soup. Clinton Hill’s The Good Batch bakery, meanwhile, is best known for its thick, soft cookies and ice-cream sandwiches, so it’s fitting that its golden honeyed-oat and pumpkin-seed blend tastes like graham crackers. At the uptown Brazilian bakery Padoca, dried currants and pecans are mixed into the coconutty oats.

The granola at Lysée is based on brown puffed rice and oats sprinkled with buckwheat groats, which lend a loud contrasting crunch and a nutty flavor that is further emphasized with roasted hazelnuts. It can be ordered with yogurt at its reservation-recommended brunch or purchased in 12-ounce glass jars at the upstairs boutique among the viennoiserie and trompe l’oeil entremets. Chef Eunji Lee chose to make her granola gluten-, dairy-, and egg-free to keep a “healthy, nutritional balance” in mind. It’s extra good when it’s paired with Lysée’s signature milk, infused with toasted brown rice and vanilla, which is, it turns out, the closest thing to topping it with more granola.