We get it. It’s 98 degrees Fahrenheit out and it’s 8pm on a Tuesday. You’ve even changed the temperature filter on Snapchat over to centigrade (that totally dumb system of measurement the whole rest of the world uses) to really emphasize just how utterly boiling it is today. As your dinner of Chipotle wraps up (don’t worry, it’s only the third time you’ve gone there this week), you begin to realize that there’s a hole in your stomach the overpriced queso didn’t quite fill. A hole that, in this dreadful weather, only ice cream can plug. Proper ice cream. We’re not talking Haagen-Dazs or Baskin Robbins here. Images of flowing rivers of soft serve, mountains made of scoops of Rocky Road and for some reason, Joe Biden dressed as a cherry-topped sundae fill your mind. You’re not an Instagram influencer though (at least you hope you’re not!), so how in the ever-loving name of Ben, or Jerry really, are you gonna find a place that can actually quench this ever-building desire and look good before you drip it all over yourself?
Well that’s why we’re here. We get it.
So here you go, curated for your tastes especially: The Three Frostiest Soft Serve Places in NYC
3. Taiyaki NYC
What are the two things that arguably would go the worst together? Ice Cream and Fish. It’s ice cream and fish, right? Well, that’s what you would think if you were mid-bite in a cod and chocolate swirl sundae, but not if you were at Taiyaki NYC. An old Japanese dessert, Taiyaki was imagined first in the Edo Period in Japan as a fish-shaped cake, filled with red bean paste. For many hundreds of years, the Taiyaki remained untouched, a simple pastry commonly associated with celebration and luck. However, this long-standing piece of culture found itself taking a new form in 2016, with the establishment of Taiyaki NYC, when these already delicious cakes found themselves becoming cones for some of the loveliest soft serve you never did have.
We had an opportunity to visit Taiyaki NYC to sample these chimerical little fish and see if they lived up to the hype and, good lord, do they. With the opportunity to choose from a wide variety of soft serves, fillings and toppings, Taiyaki’s delectable fish are swimming their way onto our list of some of the best (and most Instagram-worthy) soft serve in the city!
2. Chloe’s Soft Serve Fruit Co.
Okay hold up. What’s going on here? A FRUIT THING? You didn’t come to this list for some crazy vegan ideological conversion, did you? Did you? I mean, we accept people of all types, but if that is why you’re here, you might be on the wrong webpage.
Yes, let’s address the elephant in the room. Fruit. That weird stuff that they keep near the cereal aisle in the grocery store, down past the Lucky Charms and Reese’s. Chloe’s Soft Serve and Fruit Co. is a particularly unique soft serve place as it technically isn’t even ice cream. Hell, not even just technically –it’s flat out simply not ice cream. Chloe’s Soft Serve and Fruit Co. was founded by Chloe Epstein upon a simple principle: there’s nothing in it that Chloe wouldn’t feed her kids! The only ingredients in the soft serve are fruit, water and cane sugar. We can tell that you must be a little baffled by this right now, so let us try and explain…
Their soft serve is delicious.
“But it’s not ice cream?” you say. “It’s vegan and gluten free and organic and scary, ” you follow with. “My father was killed in a freak soft serve accident!” crying in tears, you burst out.
Well, quit your whining. Chloe’s soft serve is absolutely, one-hundred-percent delicious, and you know what else it is? Guilt free. When we had the chance to sample Chloe’s Soft Serve we were told that a large portion of their rush comes around breakfast time, as many customers see it as an alternative to heavier or more sugary breakfast foods. Even though it seems all healthy and crazy, don’t worry, there are plenty of delicious, sugary ways to get it prepared. From their classic ‘Crunchy Salty’ sundae to their Pops, any treat that you’re getting at Chloe’s is guaranteed to not only fill your desire for ice-cream but make you feel somewhat responsible while doing so.
1. Milk & Cream Cereal Bar
And number one on our list (it’s not a competition though, guys) is Milk & Cream Cereal Bar. Milk & Cream is an NYC ice cream shop located in Soho, just on the cusp of Chinatown and if you haven’t gathered already, they’ve got one unique trick up their sleeves: cereal-infused ice cream.
Milk & Cream has such an amazing set of tempting soft serve machines, and when you add tubs of every kind of cereal you could imagine to that? Let me just say that it is pretty much heaven on Earth. Cereal is almost a universal love among children, and though some of us shun it as adults, the truth is that it never stops being awesome. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a good bowl of cereal and milk, but semi-freeze that milk into a crazy dairy slush and smash up all those amazing crumbles of Lucky Charms and Reese’s into it and you have something else.
So whether you’re looking to go healthy with your soft-serve and start having fruit cones for breakfast, or if you’re just looking to revive your early Saturday mornings, these are the places for you!
