The North American Best Pastry Chef Just Happens to Work on East 21st Street
Corn is not a dessert ingredient anywhere in the world except here, and once you eat it, you'll find that genuinely hard to believe.
The room is very white. Too beautiful for 2pm on a Thursday, and exactly right for what's about to happen.
Lysée is a two-story pastry boutique on East 21st Street in the Flatiron District, and calling it a bakery is technically accurate and entirely wrong. The name is a sleight of hand: Lee's surname folded into the French word musée, meaning museum. Downstairs is the café, where you eat. Upstairs is the gallery, where individual pastries are displayed like artifacts, almost too composed to touch. The logo across the space draws from giwa, traditional Korean roof tiles. The beams are vintage wood from Korea. The nacre inlay is a material called jagae. None of this is decorative afterthought.
Lysée opened in 2022. It does not feel like a place that needed time to find itself.
The Chefs
Chef Eunji Lee grew up in Busan, South Korea, watched a television program about a pastry chef at fourteen, and decided that was it. She moved to France at eighteen. Trained at the Institut National de la Boulangerie Pâtisserie in Rouen, then at the prestigious École Ferrandi in Paris. Spent three years in the kitchen at Ze Kitchen Galerie under William Ledeuil. Then four years at the three-Michelin-starred Le Meurice, working directly under Cédric Grolet and Alain Ducasse.
She was the first non-European finalist in the French pastry competition Qui sera le prochain grand pâtissier? Lost by three points. Moved to New York in 2016 to become Executive Pastry Chef at Jungsik, a two-Michelin-starred Korean restaurant in Tribeca, where her five-course dessert tasting menu built Korean flavors through French technique. Her Baby Banana became its own kind of landmark. In 2022 she left to open Lysée.
Co-chef Matthieu Lobry is Parisian, also trained at Ferrandi, and met Lee at Le Meurice. They have been running this kitchen together since the beginning.
Since opening: La Liste Pastry Talent of the Year 2023. Food & Wine Best New Chefs 2023. James Beard Award Semifinalist for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2024 and 2026. And at the 2026 North America's 50 Best, sponsored by Valrhona, North America's Best Pastry Chef Award. This is not a new story. It's a story finally getting what it's owed.
The Menu
Lysée runs two formats. The first is the Signature Prix Fixe: $60.50 for four desserts, one set per table, recommended for at least two people. It includes The Corn, the Lysée signature cake, a Seasonal Tart, and the Kouign Amann. Additional items are available à la carte tableside, and you will order them.
The second is The Journey with Lysée, a separate dessert tasting experience on Thursday evenings at 7pm, running 2.5 to 3 hours. The focus is seasonality and the kitchen's close relationships with local farmers and artisans.
The Food
The Corn arrives. It looks like a ear of corn. A very good-looking ear of corn. What's inside: corn sablé, corn cremeux, corn mousse, grilled corn cream. Lee has said the piping alone takes three to four hours per batch. The flavor runs clean and not sweet, more mineral than sugary, the corn note present in every layer without repeating itself. I still think about it.
The Lysée signature cake is shaped after the shop's logo, the giwa roof-tile motif. Toasted brown rice mousse, pecan praline, sablé, brown rice caramel. The brown rice reads as depth here, earthy and slightly nutty, nothing like you'd expect from grain. The sweetness is restrained. Everything at Lysée is restrained in that way, letting actual flavor carry the weight instead of sugar doing the lifting.
The Seasonal Tart the day I visited was peach. The fruit was clean, the cream wasn't competing with it, and the shell had real structure. The kitchen runs its menu around what's worth using that week, and the difference between this and a pastry shop that doesn't is not subtle.
The Kouign Amann came with vanilla bean ice cream. The caramelized layers held up. The cold cream and warm pastry contrast landed. It's a simple thing done correctly, which takes more discipline than it sounds.
I added the chocolate cake, which Lee designed after the layered chocolate cakes at American steakhouses. That's a specific and correct reference. Dense, properly bitter, the kind of chocolate dessert that doesn't need to explain itself.
And a chocolate croissant. I'm predictable. It was there.
The Prices
The Signature Prix Fixe is $60.50 for four desserts, which is the right way to do a first visit. Individual pastries in the gallery start around $15 to $18. You will almost certainly add things. Factor that in before you sit down.
Who's It For
Anyone who has been eating European pastry for years and wants to understand what happens when those techniques meet a Korean sensibility and a New York kitchen. People who take dessert seriously and want to be in a room that takes it equally seriously. A couple who wants an occasion without needing a full dinner. Someone who just watched Chef Eunji Lee win North America's Best Pastry Chef 2026 and wants to know whether that's earned. Go eat the corn and find out.
Notes
Address: 44 E 21st St, New York, NY 10010 (Flatiron District)
Reservations:resy.com or lyseenyc.com/reservations
Phone: +1 646-678-3131
Hours: Tue–Thu 11am–6pm, Fri–Sat 11am–8pm, Sun 11am–7pm. Closed Monday.
Format: Signature Prix Fixe $60.50 / 4 desserts (recommended for 2+); à la carte additions available. The Journey with Lysée: Thursday evenings 7pm, ~2.5–3 hours; reservations open the 15th of each prior month.
Accolades: North America's Best Pastry Chef Award 2026 (North America's 50 Best, sponsored by Valrhona); La Liste Pastry Talent of the Year 2023; Food & Wine Best New Chefs 2023; James Beard Award Semifinalist, Outstanding Pastry Chef 2024 & 2026
Instagram: @lysee.nyc
About the Author
Kelly Gomez is a creative director who eats well, travels far, and lives with intention. She has sat at tables that required months of planning, flown routes that cross a dozen time zones, and found herself in rooms most people never find. She is precise about what she loves and honest about what falls short.
A WSET Level 2 Wine Certified writer and Advanced Open Water Diver, Kelly covers luxury travel, hotels, fine dining, wineries, diving destinations, and the trips built around them.
Her work reaches a US-based audience of travelers between 25 and 44, with a near-even gender split and a meaningful following.
