Sticky toffee pudding, a supple date cake soaked in a buttery brown sugar sauce and served warm alongside a dollop of dairy, has been a British mainstay for over half a century. Now, chefs in the United States and Britain are reinterpreting its nostalgic pleasures. The chef Patty Lee of Lei, a cozy wine bar and restaurant that opened last year in New York City’s Chinatown, first tried the dessert at a friend’s house in Ireland. “I’d seen it before and wasn’t very attracted to it,” she recalls. “Very grandpa.” But tasting the combination of chewy sponge, not-too-sweet toffee and ice cream changed her mind. At Lei, Lee transforms eight-treasure rice, a quintessential Chinese New Year dessert she grew up eating, into her own version of the confection, swapping date sponge for a mix of sticky purple rice, white beans, black sugar and a seasonally shifting array of fruits that are molded together, steamed to order and finished tableside with a dark, glossy toffee sauce crowned with an orb of ice cream. “We didn’t expect to run it all year,” Lee says. “But some days it was the most popular thing.” At Lord’s, an English bistro in Greenwich Village, the dessert takes the form of brown sugar cream cheese ice cream swirled with repurposed edge pieces of sticky toffee pudding from its sister restaurant Dame. In Ojai, Calif., the chef Meave McAuliffe of Rory’s Place makes a seasonal persimmon version in homage to autumn, grating the fresh fruit into the cake batter and topping the dish with florets of persimmon and candied hoshigaki. Even in its place of origin, the dessert is being reimagined: At Henri, a Parisian bistro in London’s Covent Garden, the chef Jackson Boxer serves sticky toffee madeleines glazed with miso-spiked toffee alongside roasted-vanilla ice cream.