Two over-the-top chain cookie sellers came to Cambridge a couple of years ago to compete from neighboring squares: Crumbl, which opened in Central Square in March, and a Chip City that followed in September 2024 in Harvard Square. Each sells massive cookies with staggering calorie counts at hefty prices. Selections rotate weekly, with seven or eight flavors available at any given time. Which chain is for you?
We visited each location Jan. 3 to buy two cookies: a classic chocolate chip and a random cookie that we were told was a current bestseller. At Chip City, that was the Cookies N Cream Cheesecake, with an oozing center as its distinguishing feature; at Crumbl, it was a S’mores Skillet Cookie, which came with a shallow paper liner beneath and a ball of buttercream above. All the treats came slightly warmed.
Better chocolate chip cookie: Chip City. This cookie had more chocolate that was melted more thoroughly, and a gooier interior overall suggestive of brown sugar. Crumbl’s cookie wasn’t bad, but had more of a cake quality, cooked consistently throughout with chips that retained their shape. Good if you like that sort of thing, but the Chip City felt both more homemade and more decadent.
Better wild card cookie: Chip City again for a relatively unremarkable Cookies N Cream Cheesecake that was a rich experience if not identifiably cookies and cream, though identifiably a cheesecake-adjacent experience; that ooze in the center had a familiar tang. The Crumbl cookie, meanwhile – what even was this? If the cookies and cream element was weak in the Chip City treat, the s’mores reference was utterly lost in this chocolate-drizzled mess of a concept, the deconstruction of a perfect dessert into tastelessness. It’s hard to understand why anyone wants a solid sphere of buttercream on a cookie, and we couldn’t bring ourselves to dig in.
Price: Crumbl is cheaper despite cookies at each shop costing $4.99. At Crumbl that actually came out to $9.98 for two; at Chip City, there’s a meal tax and sales tax applied that brought the total to $10.70.
Calories: Chip City did less damage on this visit, but wow. The chain says each of its cookies are intended to be four servings – that way a chocolate chip cookie is perceived as being only 170 calories per serving. But a whole cookie is 680 calories, and the Cookies N Cream Cheesecake wasn’t much better at 600 calories. A chocolate chip cookie is the same 680 calories at Crumbl, while a S’mores Skillet Cookie, with that glob of frosting, is a whopping 900.
Hours: Crumbl wins by offering customers more flexibility, opening earlier – 8 a.m. daily compared with Chip City’s 11 a.m. – and staying open until midnight on weekends. Otherwise, both shops close at 10 nightly. Both shops offer delivery, pickup and catering; Chip City offers nationwide shipping, while Crumbl says it’ll bring cookies curbside for you.
Bottom line: Chip City has the better cookies, and the tiny price difference probably won’t outweigh that for most. The only real advantage for Crumbl is its expanded hours, and if Chip City is closed, noshers in Harvard Square could just turn to Insomnia Cookies, 65 Mount Auburn St.
Note: These chains deliver instant ruin to a diet through proportions, and rotating flavors that are potentially fun are also possibly annoying. The local option that blows each away through skill, variety and freshness is the Cookie Time Bakery, 1375 Massachusetts Ave, Arlington, where dozens of kinds of cookie sell daily for $2.65 each – and are available in Cambridge at Formaggio Kitchen in Huron Village, Pemberton Farms in North Cambridge and Cardullo’s in Harvard Square.
Chip City, 1 Brattle Square, Harvard Square, Cambridge
Crumbl, 425 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square, Cambridge
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