Quest for the Best: Tribeca Treats Review

Location: 94 Reade Street, NY, NY

Website: Tribeca Treats

Price: Cupcakes are $2 each

Atmosphere: Hallmark meets bakery. Tribeca Treats offers a selection of greeting cards and various stationary along with its cupcakes, cookies, and gourmet chocolates, so if you need to quickly pick up a card and a cake for someone whose birthday you’ve forgotten, this is your one-stop shop.

My Review: The cupcakes offered at Tribeca Treats are tasty, and while better than some (Two Little Red Hens), they pale in comparison to others (Batch). They’re smaller than the cupcakes from most other bakeries, which is sort of disappointing since they still sport a $2 a pop price tag. The Peanut Butter Cup cupcake was probably the biggest disappointment, working better as a concept than an actual cake. It’s chocolate cake topped with peanut butter icing, and which is a bit too much peanut butter and not enough icing. It’s thick and sticks to your mouth like a peanut butter sandwich would, and I wish it had been creamier and smoother like regular icing.

The Red Velvet was tasty, with the cake part being just sweet enough, and the cream cheese icing wasn’t overwhelmingly tart like some cream cheese icings can be. The traditional Black & White, chocolate cake with vanilla icing, was good, if not remarkable. The chocolate cake Tribeca Treats offers is good—it’s moist, rather than dry and crumbly—but their icing is just sort of “blah.” The Sweet & Salty cupcake was also tasty enough, but a bit of a let down since I was expecting something that was, well, sweet and salty. It consists of chocolate cake, topped with caramel icing and bits of chocolate-covered pretzels, and while the cake and icing were good, the saltiness factor was sadly missing, as the pretzel bits weren’t enough to blend in with the sweetness. I would suggest they take notice of Batch’s Carrot Salted Caramel cupcake, which has a sprinkling of actual sea salt on top, creating a delicious combination with the sweet icing.

Bottom Line: Unless you find yourself wandering the streets of Tribeca and in need of a sweet snack, Tribeca Treats doesn’t really warrant having a place on your dessert radar. There’s nothing really bad to say about what they offer, but there’s really nothing to boast about, either.