Ben's Cookies

Ben's Cookies has a shop on The Piazza at the centre of Covent Garden's market area, selling the chunky, freshly baked cookies that the brand has made since 1983. The first shop opened in Oxford's Covered Market in 1984 and is still trading, and the business has since grown to more than 85 shops around the world, with this piazza site one of its busiest London addresses.

The founder was the cookery writer and self-described chocoholic Helge Rubinstein, and the company still frames its approach in her terms: make a really good cookie every day and customers will keep coming back. The defining detail is chocolate chunks rather than chips, baked into a dough of unsalted butter, wheat flour, cane sugar and fresh eggs, with nothing fancier than that on the ingredient list.

Fresh cookies on the Covent Garden Piazza

The range runs to more than twenty cookies, among them milk chocolate chunk, billed as the original and the daddy of the range, dark chocolate chunk, triple chocolate chunk, peanut butter and milk chocolate, white chocolate chunk, caramelised crunch, ginger and dark chocolate, coconut, oatmeal and raisin, and matcha and white chocolate, with vegan options too. Each flavour comes with its own playful character description, and cookies are usually sold warm and by weight rather than by the piece.

What to expect on a visit

The shop opens at 10am Monday to Saturday and 11am on Sunday, with later closing on Friday and Saturday evenings, and it works as a quick grab-and-go stop while exploring the piazza. Gift cards and online ordering cover anything you want sent elsewhere. It is one of the best-known dessert shops in Covent Garden, and if you prefer your cookies hand-rolled in small batches, Blondies Kitchen trades a few doors along in the Royal Opera House Arcade. For warm cookies in Covent Garden, this is the counter most visitors head for first.