Soft Serve, no jingle.
A group of nostalgic chefs gets into the cold swirl.
Maybe it’s that spring has been flirting with us these past weeks, but ice cream is on my mind. Last week, I broke the news that Salt & Straw would open two new East Coast locations in the New York City’s West Village and Upper West Side this summer. This week, I’m sharing some other ice cream news; a soft serve trend I’ve noticed of late, and it’s a good one. Chefs are bringing that beloved swirl dispensed from an idling truck with a twinkling jingle on an endless loop into the four walls of their restaurants, where its churned from fresh wholesome ingredients, not aerated milk-adjacent powders and polymers.
“I love soft serve,” said Shukette chef Ayesha Nurdjaja, who has become the city’s de facto Soft Serve Queen. “I remember that jingle every time the ice cream truck passed down my block as a child. I knew that I didn't want to have a dessert menu at Shukette, and I wanted to have something sweet that you could end the meal with. And everyone loves ice cream.” Correct.
Her signature dessert, The Mic Drop, is a house made tahini oat milk soft serve topped with halva floss, hazelnuts and seasonal fruit—candied butternut squash, pomegranate seeds, what have you. She’s also created an entire menu of soft serve sorbet in flavors that rotate with the seasons. When it’s cantaloupe time, all bets are off because I just cannot stop with that flavor. Who knew? It’s not like I run to buy cantaloupes in the grocery; it is a fruit that kind of reminds me of senior center luncheons and cottage cheese, but this soft serve is magic: a crush of fresh fruit, sweet, bright and insistently delicious.
“Whatever is in season we are juicing or pureeing to make delicious sorbet flavors,” she said. “The orange was amazing and then we twisted it with the tahini, making a "creamsicle." We have done green apple, lemon, pumpkin, peach, blackberry, honeydew, cantaloupe—basically any fruit that is in season, we are making it.”
Like Ayesha, chef Mike Solomonov does only one dessert at Laser Wolf in Brooklyn and it’s also a soft serve. His is a swirl of brown sugar vanilla soft serve topped with grape molasses and bamba, sort of a peanut butter and jelly twist that’s fantastic. You might think after a feast of salatim, platters of kebabs, rice, and sides that you would not have room for ice cream. You would be wrong.
At Swoony's, the American bistro in the Columbia Waterfront district of Brooklyn (more on this neighborhood next week), chef Sal Lamboglia does a classic vanilla soft serve swirled into a chilled silver coupe. It’s a little dish that looks like something that would have been slid across an old soda fountain counter to a kid on a swivel stool with a set of jacks in his pocket. It’s smooth, creamy, dense, and luscious, more velvet than lace. I like to order it with his “French Toast,” a dessert version of the breakfast, a wide and warm cinnamon sugared slice that eagerly takes the ice cream and melts it slightly. You will be licking puddles of melted ice cream off the plate. It’s okay.
The one and only pastry wiz Sam Mason is doing desserts at Point Seven, the beautiful seafood-centric restaurant in the MetLife Building. In the fall, he did a coconut soft serve called the Tropical Swirl, twisted with exotic fruit sorbet and topped with black sesame crunch. Now he’s onto a strawberry shortcake-inspired soft serve that looks like it’s spun from cherry blossoms. He calls it Sam's Soft Serve and it’s a vanilla bean custard swirled with strawberry sorbet topped with shortcake crumbles and jam. Are you on your way over there now? Because I am.
Dave Chang, when not suing folks for trademark infringement (he did back off and has apologized, so I applaud him there), also does soft serve at Momofuku Noodle Bar, which is celebrating 20 years in August. At the East Village location, there’s toasted barley and vanilla soft serve topped with honey and palmier, and the Uptown location does a buttermilk swirl topped with strawberry, yuzu olive oil, and sansho pepper salt.
Executive Chef Brian Ellis of Parla, the newly opened Upper West Side pizza spot from the folks behind The Smith, is churning homemade soft serve gelato in two flavors: chocolate-cherry and pistachio, that taste absolutely divine as a swirl.
And over at Stretch Pizza, chef Wylie Dufresne is making vanilla and banana soft serve. The vanilla is capped in a hard shell made of hot honey and the banana is sprinkled with milk chocolate crumbs. Grab a cup and head over to Union Square and watch the speed chess, stroll through the ramp-filled farmer’s market, watch the kids on the monkey bars, or the musicians playing WHAM in onesies (seriously), and you’ll forget all the world’s problems. Soft serve is like that; it’s kind of a magic eraser, a dessert that lets you forget the chaos of the world and your mind. And a little amnesia for the soul is a sweet relief sometimes isn’t it?
OMG I LOVE this article!! Thanks so mcuh for the inspo--I need to go to Shukette ASAP to get this MIC DROP! Also, the new Bar Primi in Penn Center has a fantastic Strawberry ice cream that is piped out and I think it qualifies as soft serve. It definitley qualifies as delicious!