Midnight Chocolate Run!

Why is a chocolate chunk cookie even more delicious when it’s delivered to your door? Students like Alexsis Johnson and Cynthia Sitou will get a taste of that conundrum as Insomnia Cookies opened its first store in Connecticut right across Chapel Street from Yale’s School of Art.

A ribbon-cutting grand opening Tuesday afternoon was attended by area business officials and a dozen free-cookie-devouring Yale students, as the regional chain’s 17th store opened with aromatic hoopla.

The chain, which began in the dorm room of now CEO Seth Berkowtiz at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, has all its outlets near a university. The outlets deliver cookies to chocolate-famished students’ rooms up to three in the morning.

You can order a pint of cold milk as well.

The smallish cookie on the tray costs $1.25; the big guy is $2.50. Minimum order for a delivery is six bucks.

Chief Operating Officer Dave Lasus said the store, which will employ ten to 15 people, is open from noon to 3 a.m. Typically three- quarters of the customers are college kids, with one third of the sales occurring between midnight and 3 a.m.

The company’s stores range from one near NYU in New York City to Cornell to Ohio State and Michigan State. Lasus said there is no correlation between academic levels and cookie consumption.

Senior Camila Yadeau praised the peanut butter cookie both for its accent of saltiness and for the real Reese’s pieces baked into the dough.

She said she is taking an art class right across the street, where the studio lights burn late for insomniac art majors.

As her friend anthropology major Alison Greenberg finished off a S’mores, Yadeau made a dire prediction: ​“All art majors are collectively going to gain lots of weight.”

In her remarks University Properties Director Abigail Rider (the property’s Yale landlord) welcomed the store as one that fulfills one of the university’s goals by helping to bring ​“motion, light, excitement to the streets of New Haven.”

The Sweetening of Downtown

Rider said Insomnia Cookies is the 13th new retail store that has opened for business downtown in the last year.

Another one of those, also at a Yale property, is Katalina’s Bakery over on Whitney Avenue next to Clark’s. Owner and baker-in-chief Kathy Riegelmann said since their opening in October business has gone well. Sales of her gluten-free vanilla cupcakes in particular are taking off.

Riegelmann is at her shop at 4 or 5 a.m., not long after the last deliveries are being made by Insomnia Cookies.

Her lease with Yale prevents her from making real breakfast foods that might compete with Clark’s. But she’s added what she calls ​“savory” cupcakes to the menu. One of those more substantial, meal-bearing items, a goat cheese cupcake with cream cheese frosting, went out the door during the course of an interview. It was accompanied by a lemon basil cupcake with strawberry frosting.

Riegelmann said she is also planning a bacon cupcake.

Meanwhile, only only a few thousand truffle-lengths away over on High Street, the pop-up chocolate fantasia store Chocopologie, which opened in October, was receiving its first customers of the day.

Over at Insomniac Cookies, COO Lasus said that the company is expanding fast, with the expectation of adding eight to ten more stores by this time next year.

An important part of the business model is that all of the cookies are baked in the same facility with the same recipe.

That’s why Alexsis Johnson knew the chocolate chunk she was tasting would be good. She had an identical one in Champaign, Illinois, near the Univesity of Illinois. Johnson hails from that city.

Lasus said the location of the baking facility is secret.

He did reveal that one the new outlets will be in Connecticut. He said he wouldn’t reveal the location because the lease is not signed. ​“It won’t be too too far away,” he said.