Welcome to Grub Street’s 2024 Fall Restaurant Preview. All week, we’re diving into the upcoming openings we’re most excited about.
We live in America, and getting a slice of cake or a slice of pie seems like a mission impossible sometimes,” says Miro Uskokovic, who last year left the Gramercy Tavern pastry-chef role he had held for a decade. He and his wife, Shilpa, decided that their upcoming bakery, Hani’s, could fix that. “There are so many places with such good croissants, especially in the East Village,” says Shilpa. “Everybody should lean into what their expertise is,” agrees Miro, “and we felt like there was a need for a place where you can go get a slice of cake.”
The idea for the bakery started to form around 2019, but it became real in 2021 when they were visiting Shilpa’s family in India and the Delta variant forced them into an unexpected lockdown for three months. “We had plenty of time to do yoga and think about what’s next, so we started writing a business plan,” says Miro. A couple years later, after convincing some family and friends to invest and looking at hundreds of commercial spaces, they got the keys to a former Dunkin’ Donuts on Cooper Square, on a block with a Ray’s Pizza, a body-piercing shop, and a barber. “I started my career at bakeries. I remember waking up even when it was dark, but you see sun coming out and the air is different — the feel is different,” he says. “Now that I’m 40, maybe that’s just a different lifestyle that I crave.”
Shilpa, who works at Bon Appétit as a senior food editor, wants the bakery to be “sort of laid back and welcoming — a little bit more accessible than a restaurant,” she says. “I think increasingly, people want something that tastes good, feels familiar, and offers them a small element of surprise.”
The Uskokovics met as international students at the Culinary Institute of America, but their fondness for this country’s baked goods isn’t entirely about taste. “There is something strangely nostalgic about American desserts,” Shilpa says. “Neither of us grew up here, but somehow we long for these things.”
Miro remembers trying carrot cake for the first time after relocating from his childhood home in Serbia to Indiana. “I was like, What the fuck? It didn’t make any sense to me because I grew up with these cakes that were like dacquoise or sponge cake with mousses and German buttercream and stuff,” he recalls. “They’re super-creamy and super-light and then suddenly you have this —”
“Cake with a vegetable,” Shilpa interjects. At Hani’s, the couple will serve a version with carrot-pineapple jam and cream-cheese frosting that, like many of the recipes at the bakery, they began developing in their home kitchen. They’ll also have a menu of toasts and sandwiches, savory pastries (like a broccoli-cheddar scone and a gochujang-scallion morning bun), plus miniature New York cheesecakes and coconut cream pie.
Of course, not every dessert started with the culture shock of carrot cake. Miro says he instantly loved the Walmart white-chocolate–macadamia-nut cookies he tried as a teen, and chocolate-chunk cookies will maintain an honored spot in the pastry case. “I find European-style cookies to be too brittle and dry,” he says. “But I’ve always loved gooey and melty.”
