When the days turn hot and sticky, and the ice cream truck jingle starts to drift through the air, I know it’s time for my yearly ritual: the first soft-serve of the summer. I always go for the classic—a chocolate and vanilla twist with rainbow sprinkles—usually from a truck on the street, and it is glorious. But this year, I had my first soft-serve of the season at an unexpected place: a restaurant.
It was a vanilla soft-serve with soy sauce caramel at Cote 550, the restaurateur Simon Kim’s new Midtown location of his popular Korean BBQ steakhouse. Served in a paper cup with a flat wooden spoon and a cookie, the ice cream felt like a surprising way to cap off a meal of wagyu beef, toro, and lychee martinis. That’s exactly why Kim likes it.
“Soft-serve is not something people traditionally would associate with fine dining,” says Kim, who has offered the dessert since day one at Cote Flatiron in 2017. “But if you just look at it from a flavor perspective, it’s something that everyone can enjoy.” Kim first started doing soft-serve as “a memorable way to end a meal without having a full pastry program.” And years later, even though the team now has a pastry program, he says that “soft-serve remains an important part of our identity.” Cote put their own twist (ha) on it with the soy sauce caramel. “We loved the idea of taking something familiar like salted caramel and adding soy sauce for that umami element that connects back to who we are as a Korean restaurant,” Kim says.
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And while summer 2026 has brought on a major fro-yo craze in New York—with much ado about the hordes of people waiting in line at places like Mimi’s, Myka, and Birdie’s—it seems we’re also in the middle of a soft-servennaisance. This summer has seen the arrival of the soft-serve margarita, a viral TikTok treat, plus the new downtown ice cream shop Unnecessary, from the Double Chicken Please team (who are known for food-inspired cocktails), which offers dirty martini soft-serve and other cocktail-inspired flavors.
Once the province of ice cream trucks, boardwalk shops, and roadside dairies, soft-serve is finding a prized place on the menus of neighborhood spots and high-end restaurants alike. While it’s not the first time soft-serve has swept the culinary world and spurred flavor experimentation (who can forget, for example, Milk Bar’s signature Cereal Milk soft-serve?), it does feel like a golden age for restaurant soft-serve. And as the food writer Emily Wilson recently observed, restaurants have some of the best ice cream around.
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When I told friends and colleagues I was doing this story, the first word out of most people’s mouths was “Leo.” Indeed, the Williamsburg restaurant has been a soft-serve haven since it opened in 2019. “We had it from the beginning,” Leo chef and co-owner Mike Fadem says. When opening the restaurant, the team’s focus was to be unfussy. “I loved the idea of the pizza slices and the soft-serve, and that kind of being like growing up in middle America,” he says. After all, soft-serve is pure nostalgia, a gustatory short-cut to childhood memories.
Leo finishes their soft-serve with a drizzle of olive oil and some sea salt, and they change the flavors every few months (it’s currently a summer cult-favorite: corn and blueberry). That flavor, and the upcoming one–peanut ice cream with grape sorbet–are the ones “that people are constantly reaching out about, constantly DMing, constantly coming in and begging us to make again,” Fadem says. The team waits for the produce to come in season, and they aim to replicate the flavor of the fruit as closely as possible. “It’s not like a big moneymaker for us, but it’s definitely fun,” Fadem says.
