You may not know it, but Costco’s Food Court is one of the busiest fast-food restaurants in the country. A lot of that traffic is due to their iconic $1.50 hot dog that still comes with a refillable soda and their huge slices of pizza for $1.99. Another part of that is that Costco doesn’t only stick to the classics. They experiment and grow. They’re willing to fail and learn.
It’s a great ethos to have. Good for you, Costco.
Speaking to all of that, 2024 opened with Costco adding a brand-new item to their U.S. Food Court menu — the Double Chocolate Chunk Cookie (served warm). As an avid Costco Food Court fan, I knew I had to review this cookie ASAP. I love the flavors of a good chocolate chip cookie, which often lean into flavors of some of my favorite bourbons (vanilla, brown butter, dark chocolate, brown sugar, and so forth).
Just looking at the cookie on the Costco Food Court menu, this felt like it was going to be my new favorite item on the menu. So below, I’m breaking down exactly what this new item is and how it stands up. Let’s just get straight into it.
- Trader Joe’s And Costco Face Off In The Ultimate Pumpkin Pie Battle
- Costco’s Entire Food Court Menu, Re-Tested And Ranked For 2023
- Can Costco’s Irish Whiskey Beat Jameson Irish Whiskey? Let’s Find Out
- Weiner Wars — Can Costco’s Iconic Hot Dog Beat Our Blind Test Champ?
- Can Costco’s Tequila Beat 8 Other Amazing Tequilas Blind? We Found Out
- Can Costco’s Bottled-In-Bond Bourbon Beat A Bunch Of Classics In A Blind Test?
Double Chocolate Chunk Cookie
Price: $2.49
Calories: 750
The Cookie:
The cookie is “served warm” as mentioned. And that’s pretty awesome. You can see the cookies resting in the heating tray next to Costco’s warm but underwhelming churros, Chicken Bakes, and so on. The “double” aspect is apparent. The cookie looks like a cookie baked over another cookie, giving this treat some real girth.
The chocolate chips (“bittersweet and semi-sweet”) are big and chunky as advertised as well. They’re also abundant. There’s a good ratio of cookie to chunk in the actual cookie.
This is also advertised as being “all butter” on the menu. We’ll get to that in a moment. Overall, this looks and smells like a great chocolate chip cookie.
Taste:
First, this had a great soft chewiness to the center with a nice crisp outer rim. It’s a perfectly baked cookie.
The actual taste was … mediocre. There was zero butteriness. It felt like it was made with a butter substitute that was completely stripped of the fats needed to brown to add that delicious brown butter flavor that you need in a good cookie. There was a hint of vanilla but it too felt stripped down. You could tell the “vanilla” was from a plastic bottle, is what I’m getting at.
The chocolate was pretty damn good. It was creamy, bitter, and semisweet in all the right ways. You could tell this is where all the money went into the cookie.
Bottom Line:
It just felt sort of soulless. There was no rich butteriness, much less a brown-butter vibe. There was a sense of the vanilla but it was fake-feeling.
As I ate this cookie, I kept coming back to “soulless” as the only adjective I could think of. It wasn’t bad by any stretch. But it felt more like a Chips Ahoy! than a delicious bakery fresh cookie. And for 750 calories per cookie (HOLY SHIT!), I don’t want “soulless.” I need soulful.
Without getting too much into Ebbinghaus and Proust and the ins and outs of involuntary memory, this cookie should have transported me to something beautiful in my mind. A fond memory of my grandmother’s cookie jar or a bespoke bakery in visited in Manhattan or London or … something, anything. Instead, I just sort of sat there thinking, “Meh…” while waiting for it to be over and writing off the calories in my mind as a work-based obligation.
In fact, I kind of wanted to dip this into some good bourbon to give it a better and deeper flavor profile — something to help it be … more. But then I probably would have been kicked out of Costco. Sadly, I’ll probably never get this again.
