Philly’s Soft-Serve Summer Is Here
Blood orange and olive oil, matcha floats, and shallot caramel drizzle — Philly restaurants are going all out with their gourmet ice cream.
Soft-serve ice cream from Dear Daphni / Photograph by Gab Bonghi
Soft-serve ice cream is anything but vanilla these days. It seems everywhere you go, restaurants and bakeries are putting their own twist on the summertime classic. At Carbon City, there’s a blood orange, olive oil, and sea salt combination. Tabachoy’s ube soft serve – which has been on the menu since the restaurant opened in 2022 — continues to delight diners. Small Oven Pastry Shop changes their ice cream flavors and specialty toppings every week in the summer — they’ll have dates, matcha, and buttered popcorn in the coming weeks. If you’re looking for a vegan option, 20th Street Pizza currently has vanilla and dark chocolate swirl available with a sourdough waffle cone (but keep checking their Instagram for the latest flavor). And pop into Frankie’s Summer Club, and you’ll find a whole soft-serve menu featuring olive oil, pistachio, strawberry rhubarb jam, coffee, and more.
As with many food trends lately, nostalgia is a big driving force behind soft serve’s appeal. “Since we are open daytime into evening, we really wanted something nostalgic that people would crave all day long,” Chloé Grigri, co-owner of Supérette, says. The French-inspired wine bar always serves two flavors: usually, a take on vanilla (currently Nilla Wafer) that can be swirled with an ever-changing seasonal flavor (right now, it’s raspberry).
For Càphê Roasters co-founder Thu Pham, memories of the Mister Softee truck that would frequent her North Philadelphia neighborhood growing up were a reason to get a soft-serve machine. Beyond just cones, Càphê Roasters puts its popular condensed-milk soft serve atop a regular or matcha latte, and occasionally other drink specials. Tabachoy’s Chance Anies also has fond memories of Mister Softee and wanted to offer that “piece of summertime nostalgia” to his diners. “When I moved to Philly, when I was a teenager, I fell in love with just being able to walk up to a Mister Softee and grab an ice cream cone,” he says.
Ice cream cones from Friday Saturday Sunday / Photograph by Clay Williams
Pastry chef Amanda Rafalski was inspired by her own “happy summer memories” while developing the passion fruit soft serve at Friday Saturday Sunday and The Lovers Bar. “Everybody always has memories of going to Dairy Queen, or whatever ice cream shop, and getting a cone of soft serve that’s dripping down your hand,” she says. Rafalski wanted to emulate that experience, serving the dessert in cones at the end of the meal. “It forces you to use your hands and have a little fun,” she says, adding that “you can do so much with” the dessert by changing the flavors and toppings, making it “a great canvas.” This season’s offering is topped with a tropical crunch and a shallot-caramel drizzle. Since Rafalski makes her soft serve from scratch, switching up the flavor isn’t always simple — depending on what she’s adding to her base, she’ll tinker with the formula to maintain its consistency — but once that’s figured out, it’s easy to dole out during service.
“If you can figure out the base, the sky’s the limit for a super-creative soft-serve menu,” New June’s owner Noelle Blizzard says. Her bakery — which offers salted vanilla bean ice cream topped with peanut butter brownie bits, salted caramel, and/or rainbow sprinkles — will kick off an ice cream happy hour this Friday, August 1st. It’ll be a weekly event hosted Thursday through Saturday from 4 to 9 p.m.
A sundae from New June Bakery / Photograph by Kate Morrison
Soft serve makes sense from a business perspective, too. “[It] adds a simple addition to the menu and can be dished out easily and quickly. It removes heating dessert and plating for a quick treat, especially when guests are in a hurry,” says Kareem McCafferty, vice president of Schulson Collective, which includes restaurants Dear Daphni, Sampan, and Double Knot — all of which have house-made soft serve on the menu. And in the summertime especially, it’s a surefire way to drive foot traffic. “Summer can be hard on restaurants and bakeries in Philadelphia, pushing us to get creative and give people the dessert they most crave in 90-degree weather,” says Blizzard, who plans to serve ice cream at New June until at least September, and potentially beyond.
At Càphê Roasters, Pham has found it pays to make the dessert all year. “The margins are great on soft serve, especially if you have it on the menu year-round,” she says, adding that a soft-serve machine is easier to maintain than one that makes ice cream, and isn’t too expensive. (The restaurant-grade equipment can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to upwards of $20,000 for high-end models.) It helps that the machine doubles as storage, too. “From a practical standpoint, the fact that the machine itself acts as its own storage vessel is quite convenient,” Grigri says. “These machines, although not particularly romantic aesthetically, serve as ‘dessert and a show’ without encumbering basement freezers.”
While soft serve is having a moment, with so many Philly businesses investing in machines to make it, it’s likely our relationship with the treat is more than just a summer fling. A convenient option all year round, it seems soft serve is increasingly what’s for dessert.
