HAS SOFT SERVE REACHED PEAK SAVORY (or are we just getting started)?
Sweet corn, butter, dill pickle, tomato-peach-habanero? Savory ice cream is taking inspiration from chefs’ plates.
Words: Susie Davidson Powell
Lead photo: Victoria Sedefian/The Dishing. Additional images, provided.
We’ve had a lot of soft serve ice cream this year. After asking three upstate restaurants to come up with an August flavor featuring Piro olive oil, the seasons are changing and with it the flavors. At Familiar Creature, the black sesame with Oreo, olive oil + sea salt has given way to sweet corn soft serve drizzled in lime syrup + topped off with blackberry powder, corn nuts and Malden salt. The result is fresh corn meets dried fruit in a combo that chef Michele Hunter laughingly says, “tastes like Cap’n Crunch.” And at Little City Luncheonette, Chef Arvin Clemente’s early fall sundae is vanilla topped with Piro extra virgin olive oil, fennel pollen + sea salt. Chef’s kiss.
Of course, the 2025 emergence of Dominique Ansel’s vanilla bean butter-dipped soft serve submerged into melted Isigny Ste. Mère French butter for a thin butter shell finished with sea salt only gained momentum in 2026, ushering in what we’re affectionately calling salty, or savory, soft serve. And now September is proving there are in fact no limits. In NYC, the recently opened Unnecessary ice cream shop, from the creative team behind the award-winning cocktail bar, Double Double Chicken Please, segued into late summer/early fall with a Tomato, Spice + Everything Nice flavor featuring heirloom tomato, peach, sweet corn, yellow pepper + habanero topped in basil oil + garnished with an oversized Parmesan crisp. Then Lisbonata, a Portuguese dessert shop specializing in Pastéis de Nata decided to collab with Dilli by Lilli’s pickles and brine and a brand new dill pickle soft serve was born. topped with their pasel del nata flakes turned into dill pickle chips. The inspo behind it all? A Polish wife, a decade spent in Poland, and summer memories of pickle making during a Turkish childhood.
Have you tried any savory soft serve flavors? Let us know.
Above, L to R:
- Tomato, Spice + Everything Nice at Unnecessary, NYC.
- Dill Pickle soft serve with pickle brine chips at Lisbonata, NYC.
- Vanilla bean butter-dipped soft serve at Dominique Ansel, NYC.
- Sweetcorn, lime syrup, blackberry powder, corn nuts, Malden Salt at Familiar Creature, Saratoga Springs