Today’s king cake review is a “restaurant edition,” i.e., I both ate this in a restaurant AND you, too, can only consume this in said restaurant. Today, we will be reviewing Saba’s Babka King Cake.

In 2023, this particularly king cake is being sold by the slice ONLY at Saba, which is located at the corner of Magazine Street and Nashville Avenue in Uptown New Orleans. This king cake has been offered in whole-cake form in years prior, but this year it’s only by the slice. Deal with it!! Luckily, the food at Saba is fab, and so you shouldn’t have a hard time justifying a trip over there for a delicious meal of the world’s best pita bread and hummus before indulging in a little babka. I’m going to lead off this review by saying that, yes, babka is its own thing and thus technically not a king cake. But let’s appreciate that Alon Shaya (the chef-owner of Saba) has found a really cool way to incorporate his Israeli heritage into New Orleans culture. We embrace this. We love this. Long live hybrid king cakes that incorporate the cultures of other countries and their cuisine!

After eating quite a bit of pita bread and blue crab hummus, we were presented with a slice of the traditional babka with pomegranate caramel sauce. Our server asked if we wanted a scoop of Tahitian vanilla ice cream with the babka. Yes, we love ourselves. Yes, we want the ice cream.

I’ll concede here that I don’t personally know all that much about babka, but from what I’ve read, it shares some striking similarities to New Orleans king cake. It is a sweet braided dough and people argue over whose is the best. According to the BBKC, babka can be criticized for being dry (a problem that Saba has apparently prevented by soaking the dough in a cinnamon syrup). Sound familiar? The BBKC also informed me that the babka includes olive oil whipped in, which I never would have guessed, but is very on brand for Saba.

When this was delivered to our table, the first thing I noticed was the smell. It smelled like Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I love Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It is one of the few highly processed foods (other than Oreos) that I still think is perfect. This cake is served warm (and yes, I recommend the ice cream).

The babka is obviously beautiful. If you zoom in the photograph, you can see exactly how the dough is braided. I need to read more about dough braiding so that I can better explain this, but trust me when I say that I’ve started to really notice that a braided dough does absolute wonders for king cake (and, I guess, by extension, babka). It allows the flavors to be woven into the bite in an entirely different way, and I’ve also personally (anecdotally?) found that braided dough retains moisture better and doesn’t dry out as easily. But who am I to say—I’ve never baked a braided dough in my life. I’m just someone who loves to eat and also likes words. Anyway, the texture of the babka was delicious and it wasn’t dry at all, which was probably aided by the ice cream and caramel sauce, but in any event, it was fantastic.

This particular babka was very heavy on the cinnamon, which I didn’t mind, because it was a wonderful cinnamon flavor that was not at all off-putting; however, I do think it may have overpowered some of the other flavors. For example, we were told that the babka was hazelnut chocolate babka. It was? Are you sure? I didn’t really get any chocolate, and I certainly didn’t get any hazelnut. My friends with me thought they tasted apple. We asked the server if there was another fruit element, and he said we were probably getting the orange zest. We then had a long discussion about whether we thought the apple flavor was just some sort of Pavlovian response to all of the cinnamon, and my my friend insisted that, no, she really did taste apple and definitely not orange zest. There you have it.

All in all, this is a delicious dessert and an excellent babka. I didn’t find the flavors as complex as I wanted them to be in my unreasonably high expectations, but I thoroughly enjoyed eating this. And my instinct, readers, is that most of you still won’t categorize this as king cake despite my plea for more king cake inclusivity! If you make it to Saba prior to February 21, order this and enjoy it. And get the ice cream on top. 4 stars.