Verdict’s Cookies Are Half Brownie and Worth the Chase
A blue ribbon triple mocha and a miso peanut butter, dense enough to last all day. Here’s how to get a box before the next drop sells out.
Chicago’s newest cookie is hard to get. The drop I ordered from sold out in an hour. I got a box anyway, paid for it myself, and then spent the rest of the day eating it in small, deliberate pieces. These are not cookies you finish in one sitting.
Verdict makes two cookies right now: a triple mocha and a chunky peanut butter with miso. They come four to a box for $36, and they’re baked out of The Hatchery, the kitchen incubator in East Garfield Park you might remember from Bobby’s Fried Chicken. Different food, same energy. Small operators doing one thing with real care.
Start with the size, because it’s the first thing you notice when you pick one up. These live somewhere between a cookie and a brownie, and they’re built like it. Big, heavy, dense all the way through. Every cookie is several sittings’ worth of bites, and I suspect Steve, the owner, knows exactly what he’s doing there. You will not crush this box in one go. You’ll try. You’ll stop.
The packaging helps. The box is clean and well branded, the kind you don’t feel weird handing to someone as a gift. Inside, each cookie is sealed in its own zip-top bag, so you can take a few bites, close it up, and come back later. That’s how I ate mine. A few bites in the morning, a few after lunch, a few more after dinner. Nibbling as a lifestyle.
The triple mocha is the one to order. It took a blue ribbon at the Texas State Fair in a blind taste test, and as a chocolate person, it was my favorite of the two without much debate. It’s rich and deeply chocolatey, with a little hit of salt that keeps pulling you back for the next bite. It reminds me of a corner brownie that is nice and chewy, but crunchy along the side.
The peanut butter is good too, and it’s the more interesting cookie on paper. You can taste what the miso is doing to the peanut butter base: rounding it out, adding a savory depth, making it taste more like peanut butter than peanut butter does on its own. If you want a refresher on what miso actually does to flavor, I wrote about the history of miso here. It’s the same trick, applied to a cookie.
Now the part that matters, because good cookies you can’t get are just a rumor.
Follow Verdict on Instagram. That’s where drop dates get announced, and I don’t know when the next one is, so pay attention. Then join their email list. They don’t spam. Being on the list gets you early access to order before the drop opens up wider, and when a drop sells out in an hour, that head start is the whole game.
When you order, you pick a pickup slot and show up for it. This drop picked up at Sandmeyer’s Bookstore in Printers Row, which is a very cute bookstore in one of my favorite neighborhoods in the city. I’ll take any excuse to hang out in Printers Row. Steve hands you the box himself, and he’s a genuinely nice guy to sit and chat with for a minute if he’s not slammed.
Is $36 for four cookies cheap? No. But they’re big, they’re tasty, and I wasn’t upset for a second about paying it. I appreciate people doing small-batch food with this much attention to quality, and that’s worth supporting. I’ll order again, and I think the whole experience, from the hunt to the handoff, earns the price.
Verdict is Solid. Get on the list, grab the mocha, and pace yourself. Diet starts Monday.
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