There is a brunch spot in Williamsburg that people fly into New York specifically to eat at. Not for the setting — it is a casual room on Wythe Avenue — and not for the price. For a pancake.
Sunday in Brooklyn’s malted pancake has been one of the city’s most written-about brunch dishes since the restaurant opened in 2016. The Michelin Guide has recognized the restaurant. Timeout, PureWow, and every food-obsessed New York blog has dissected it. Weekend reservations vanish on Resy within hours of release, and walk-in waits routinely hit 90 minutes on Saturday mornings.
The pancake itself is the size of a dinner plate, golden-brown with a mottled surface, and sliced open reveals an interior that is closer to a set custard than a conventional flapjack. It comes draped in hazelnut maple praline and brown butter.
Two techniques make it what it is: malted milk powder in the batter, and finishing the pancake in the oven instead of flipping it on the stovetop. Together they produce something no griddle-only method can match.
What Makes It Different
Most pancakes cook entirely on a flat surface. You heat one side, flip, heat the other. The interior cooks by conduction from two directions, and large pancakes almost always have a raw, gummy center by the time the outside is browned enough to flip.
Sunday in Brooklyn uses a cast-iron skillet, stovetop heat to set the bottom and edges, and then the oven to finish. The result is a pancake where the heat reaches the interior evenly from all sides — the bottom continues to sear against the cast iron, while the top and sides are surrounded by 375°F convection air. The pancake puffs. It sets uniformly. The interior is custardy and soft without being raw.
The malted milk powder adds two things: a fast, even Maillard browning from the sugars the malt enzymes liberate from starch, and a subtly nutty, sweet background flavor that makes the pancake taste richer without any additional sugar.
The hazelnut maple praline is not garnish. It is a fundamental component — thick, pourable, and toasty in a way that ordinary maple syrup cannot match. Make it. It keeps for two weeks in the refrigerator.
The Batter Rules
Two rules matter more than any specific measurement:
Do not overmix. Stir until no dry flour streaks remain, then stop. The batter should be visibly lumpy. Overmixing develops gluten, which makes pancakes dense and chewy instead of light.
Do not rush the pan signals. The pancake tells you when it is ready for the oven: edges go matte and set, bubbles break across the entire top surface and stay open. If you move the pan too early, the batter is not stable enough to hold its structure in the oven and the pancake collapses.
Comparing Other Pancake Recipes
| Sunday in Brooklyn | IHOP Buttermilk | Cracker Barrel | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Secret ingredient | Malted milk powder | Extra baking powder | Brown sugar |
| Cooking method | Skillet + oven finish | Flat griddle, flip only | Flat griddle, flip only |
| Interior texture | Custardy, soufflé-like | Fluffy, conventional | Dense, biscuit-adjacent |
| Syrup | Hazelnut maple praline | Standard maple | Standard maple |
| Restaurant wait | 60–90 min weekend | None | 20–30 min |
If you want to explore the stovetop-only fluffy pancake style, the Japanese soufflé pancakes achieve a similar custard-like interior through a different method — beaten egg whites — that requires a ring mold and a lid. The Sunday in Brooklyn method is more forgiving and produces a more substantial result. For classic American buttermilk pancakes, IHOP’s buttermilk pancake recipe is the benchmark for the griddle method.
Make the Praline in Advance
The hazelnut maple praline is the one component that genuinely benefits from being made ahead. Freshly made praline is warm and loose and pours easily; refrigerated overnight it thickens slightly but loosens again when spooned over a hot pancake. Make a batch on Friday and you have both weekend brunches covered. The praline also works on waffles — the Waffle House pecan waffle gets a meaningful upgrade from this syrup in place of standard maple.
The Brown Butter
Do not skip the brown butter. It takes five minutes and a single small pan, and it changes the pancake. Plain melted butter is fat and little else; brown butter has nutty, toasty compounds from the Maillard browning of the milk solids that carry flavor in a way no other fat does. The brown butter and the hazelnut praline are separately subtle — together they create the layered, complex sweetness that makes the Sunday in Brooklyn version taste like more than the sum of its parts.
Watch it closely: the butter will foam, the foam will recede, and you will see small golden flecks appear in the bottom of the pan. That is the moment. Pour it off the heat immediately — it goes from golden to burned in under a minute once those solids start browning.
Scaling Notes
The recipe as written makes three large restaurant-style pancakes. For two people who are genuinely hungry, that is enough. For a table of four, double the batter (and the praline if yours is already used up). The batter can sit up to 30 minutes before cooking without losing lift; refrigerating overnight causes it to deflate and is not recommended.
If you want smaller, more manageable pancakes rather than the dinner-plate versions, use a ½-cup ladle per pancake and adjust the oven time down to 3 to 4 minutes rather than 5. Smaller pancakes do not need the oven finish as desperately — a careful stovetop flip on a lower heat achieves a similar result — but the oven method still produces a better interior texture at any size.
