Sweets From the Salty Lunch Lady

A little luncheonette in Ridgewood.

Feb 21, 2024

In year one of the pandemic, there was a little sandwich shop called L’itos popping-up inside an old brick oven pizza shop on Henry Street in the Lower East Side. Occasionally, chef Dria Atencio, a friend of the hosts, would bake classic layer cakes and jammy fruit bars for dessert. It was late 2020 and New York was still in its reopening phase after a traumatic lockdown. Roving pop-ups were booming because a) a lot of cooks and chefs were out of work and b) the rest of us had grown tired of our own cooking.

Word about Atencio’s layer cakes spread and soon, she was headlining her own pop-ups. A little over a year later, she announced that she would be opening a space in Ridgewood, Queens. When Eater New York asked me to contribute to their “Year in Eater” year-end roundup in 2022, Atencio’s place was one of my most anticipated openings.

Salty Lunch Lady’s Little Luncheonette (a moment for that alliteration) opened last June with a short menu of six sandwiches and three desserts. The sandwiches are constant, save for a daily special here and there, and while a cake, pie, and cookie are fixtures for dessert, the flavors change weekly.

I don’t live in or anywhere near Ridgewood, so it took me a few months to make it out there for lunch. Really, it was months of seeing layer cake after layer cake on my Instagram feed that persuaded me to make the two transfers (that’s three trains) to get to this part of Queens. But now that I’ve had Atencio’s cakes, ironically, it’s her sliced pies that take up the most real estate in my mind.

Sandwiches are listed on the board. Desserts, which are set out on the bar, sell themselves.

It was peak citrus season on my first visit and Atencio was leaning into the bright, zesty flavors of tangerines and cara cara oranges. The pie of the day had a crushed Saltine crust and a mixed citrus custard filling that hovered beguilingly between milky, sweet, and tart. A gargantuan quenelle of whipped cream with specs of orange zest decorated each slice. Served slightly chilled, each bite was a cool mouthful. Refreshing, even. I noticed a couple next to me nibbling at a cookie, but when they switched to this pie, it was gone in seconds.

Another time, I was hoping it would be peanut butter day, but the pie was pandan coconut cream instead. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I find coconut cream pies to be an especially lusty combination. Atencio’s silken pandan custard was as green as a certain Jim Henson puppet, and just as endearing. Coconut cream was dolloped generously on top, finished with toasted coconut slivers. I can’t recall a dessert with a more commanding aroma. The Nilla Wafer crust had a zealous salting, which I’ve decided is the secret to Atencio’s pie wizardry.

Atencio prefers to make cookie crust pies with fillings like mixed citrus (left) and pandan coconut (right).

The pies get my top-billing in part because they were a surprise, but that doesn’t mean the cakes were any less praiseworthy. I just expected them to be good — and they were.

One day, the luncheonette was slicing “Natalie’s wedding cake” (Natalie, I learned, is Atencio’s friend’s little sister). It was a three layer fudgy chocolate buttermilk cake split with chocolate ganache and a peek-a-boo layer of chewy marzipan. This was the kind of casual indulgence I could get behind — sitting alone at the counter on a random Saturday afternoon, I too could revel in Natalie’s nuptials. The cake was elegant, but also cozy like a cup of cocoa.

More recently, I tried a fluffy two layer vanilla butter cake sandwiching a sweetish orange curd with vanilla bean-flecked buttercream. It seems as though the cakes at the luncheonette are also sliced on the cool side. As a result, the frosting can sometimes be a little stiff, like butter straight from the fridge. Cake, like wine, needs some time to breathe (or, come to room temperature). Once it does, the textures and flavors are so much more vivid.

Atencio often uses a mix of oil and butter to achieve a soft crumb.

The cakes that Atencio bakes taste like something I should be able to make myself. This is both a compliment to the chef and a little erroneous self-flattery. I can’t actually bake a cake like this, not without significant practice, but that’s the whole point. Atencio’s desserts are homey and familiar, but there’s finesse beneath the surface. It takes skill and experience to make something difficult look easy. And as I’ve learned over the years, that’s the oldest restaurant trick in the book.

In addition to pie and cake, there are usually a plate of cookies on the bar. Sometimes, Atencio treats her cookies like cakes and frosts them with a thick layer of icing. If you’re a frosting person, these are for you.

Atencio uses her grandmother’s recipe for sugar cookies.

The luncheonette honors its name and is only open for lunch. Sandwiches have names like Fancy Bologna and Dill Party, and are made with Tempesta mortadella or house-roasted turkey. At around $15, they are pricier than the going rate in this neighborhood (slices of cake and pie are roughly $11). But that’s the tricky thing about using artisanal quality ingredients and from-scratch cooking that requires more labor. The food just costs more.

To me, a perfect luncheonette lunch is a warm smashed chicken meatball sandwich (the “Chicky”) with caramelized onions and Bulgarian feta followed by whatever pie Atencio is slicing that day. And probably a slice of cake to go.

Sandwiches are built on Sullivan Street Bakery bread.

True to the form, Atencio’s luncheonette is an informal place. You order at the counter, get your own water and utensils, then pick up your food at the kitchen window in the back. When you’re done, you bus your own plates. It has an easy, cafeteria-like self-sufficiency. There’s also a little shoppy-shop in the corner stocked with savory things like Graza olive oil and Rancho Gordo beans.

Atencio hand-picked everything, from the vintage light fixtures to the refurbished bistro chairs.

When I dropped by the bakery after-hours to fact-check a few things, Atencio told me that, incredibly, she doesn’t write down her dessert recipes. This feels counterintuitive to me, but Atencio is a savory chef by training, not a pastry chef (she also makes most of the sweets herself). “I never thought I’d be making desserts,” she told me, noting that she initially just wanted to be a lunch lady that made really great sandwiches.

But Atencio has a knack for desserts, as the success of her early pop-ups confirmed. Thankfully, she didn’t ignore it. Besides, lunch ladies and classic American desserts provide something similar — nourishment — and that’s really what Atencio is after. Food that “feels like someone is hugging you from the inside,” as she put it.

If Atencio has opened her dream restaurant in Ridgewood, she has also imbued it with her own spirited humor. On an early visit, some sugar cookies had baked into slightly irregular shapes so Atencio decided to knock a dollar off the price. She dictated a cheeky note explaining the price cut to Sofia Cosentino, her operations manager, who wrote it down and placed it by the cookies.

Atencio doesn’t often post these daily quirks on social media. You have to be there in person to catch the moment, as I was that day. It helps to live nearby, then. Even more so when the sweet of the week appeals to you, so you can just pop in for a slice. If you’re an out-of-towner like me you simply get what you get, like a bakery roulette. But regardless of what Atencio has stashed in the pie case or under the glass cloche, I doubt you’ll ever be upset.