Best of New York 2009 • Eating

• Momofuku Ssäm Bar

  207 Second Ave., at 13th St.; 212-254-3500

  For a restaurant empire that everyone likes to label Asian, Momofuku covers a lot of regional American ground. Case in point: the killer biscuits and gravy on Ssäm Bar’s new weekend brunch menu. Like many winning dishes, this one was born at a family meal, when a cook named Gabe resuscitated his Atlanta family’s biscuit recipe. The special Momofuku touch, though, comes from the rendered pork-jowl fat baked into them. That, and the country-ham scraps enriching the gravy, and the slices of savory ham-hock terrine that are toasted onto one half of the biscuit before it’s piled with tremulously soft eggs stirred with crème fraîche over almost imperceptible heat.

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