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Like most kids, I grew up with ice cream. But unlike most kids, my earliest memory of ice cream is the sound of churning drums in my family’s cafe: Cafolla’s in Newtownards, Ireland. Ice cream as I knew it then was a clean, circular click and sweep from silver scooper to yellow wafer cone. In summer, it became an oyster wafer shell with a half-moon of chocolate and coconut flakes, filled with ice cream and studded with pink and white marshmallows. During the pandemic, we pivoted to ice cream tub deliveries: cartons rippled with raspberry sauce and roast hazelnuts for Valentine’s Day, pots of Biscoff sauce we squeezed out in conveyor-belt fashion. The algebraic formula for the silky—and secret—vanilla flavor traveled from generations of Cafollas in a small mountain village in Lazio, Italy to the northeastern crook of Ireland, and currently lives in my dad’s head. It’s an oral history that is yet to be passed down to me, but I still know my way around the science of a good scoop.
It seems I’m not the only one excited about new frontiers in the world of ice cream: in recent years, chefs, artisans, and pop stars alike have taken to putting playful twists on their sweet icy treats. In 2024, Dua Lipa sang the praises of olive oil and sea salt on vanilla ice cream. Last spring, Copinette, a New York restaurant serving American cuisine with French influences, debuted a dirty martini sundae: Madagascan vanilla bean gelato with honey sauce, infused with gin and olive brine, topped with crumbled blue cheese, Vastelvetrano olives, and lemon zest. In summer, British designer Anya Hindmarch set up a colorful shop in London for the third year selling ice-cream tubs inspired by a typical pantry stock—Kikkoman soy sauce, Heinz baked beans, Perelló olives. And at the popular Abbey Inn in England’s North Yorkshire moors, they’ve taken to serving up creamy sourdough ice cream with rich hay custard, as well as soft serves that make use of the area’s potato harvest: a Douglas fir, blackcurrant, and white chocolate sundae, and a Charlotte potato cream with roast chicory root, rye fudge, and potato tuille. (Meanwhile, in the tiny village of San Lorenzo, Ibiza, I said farewell to summer with a goat’s cheese ice cream at Casa Lhasa—and I still regularly stalk the Instagram of a small gelateria in Mallorca for its rotating flavor roster.)
With the restaurant industry currently in turmoil, there’s been a necessary push to take desserts more seriously. As diners drink less and bills get shorter, a more enticing finale may help to plug that gap. Plus, in wine bars restrained by small kitchens, the ice cream coupe offers ample space for experimentation, allowing chefs to push the boundaries with the produce and tools at hand and easily tweak their recipes to keep regulars on their toes.
At Brio, an Italian restaurant in Amsterdam, a meal could happily either begin or end with their focaccia soft serve, which comes with peanut sauce, quince jelly, olive oil, and sea salt. “We have a seasonal menu, and as we were starting to talk about changing the soft serve flavor, while also wondering how to start using our leftover focaccia—and those two problems turned into one idea,” says Maddie Caldwell, a chef at Brio. Last fall, they also ran a sweetcorn ice cream with blackberry jam and fresh blackberries. “The sweetcorn ice cream tasted a bit like the leftover milk in a bowl of cornflakes—in a nice way! We’ve also had a fig leaf soft serve with roasted apricots and almond frangipane crumb. Getting to play around is the best part of having a seasonal menu.”
In London last year, chef and restaurateur Jackson Boxer collaborated with the legendary Michelin-starred French chef Claude Bosi for a seafood-based menu at Southern French Mayfair bistro Socca. Boxer was tasked with developing a sweet riff on Guinness and oysters: a classic, harmonious pairing where the delicate, sweet iodine of the oysters interpolates with the bolshie caramel stout. “Claude has a keen eye for a savory-sweet experimentation, and I was flattered that he thought me worthy and capable of this challenge,” says Boxer. Contrary to what anyone shooting an oyster (rather than chewing one) would think, an oyster is not actually salty—that’s the brine. “An oyster is bright and sweet, with a pronounced iodine richness and pearlescent minerality,” explains Boxer. Because they’re high in protein, oysters behave like egg yolks when poached in dairy, “thickening and enriching.”
“They make very good ice cream. Silky, slightly saline, with a beautiful sheen which I find irresistible both in flavor and appearance,” says Boxer. “It took a lot of fine-tuning to get right, but it was one of the most rewarding, successful challenges I set myself this year.” With some tweaking, it debuted on his restaurant Orasay’s fall menu: a whorling Guinness cake slathered in treacle butter, topped with an elegant, creamy oyster quenelle.
At Boxer’s latest opening, Below Stone Nest—where visitors can slide in from Soho to eat bright octopus gildas and plates of gorgonzola with sausage—something sweet was needed to round out the menu. “We were determined to keep our drinks list free of espresso martinis, which have become so ubiquitous, and I find them far too sweet,” says Boxer. “I wanted to play with a soft serve machine to produce a frozen alcoholic coffee sorbet.” With too much sugar syrup needed to stabilize it, they were “insufferably” sweet, lacking coffee’s bitterness and depth. “I started adding dairy back in, like a frozen boozy cafe au lait,” says Boxer. Basically, a White Russian. “My sobriety is rarely challenged—however, this process was so fun and delicious, I did at certain points have to question my enthusiasm with which I was tasting and adjusting.”
Recently, you might have seen New Yorkers cracking open tubs of Betty Jo’s Ice-Cream in viral TikToks: popping the lid revealed pie crust lattice tops, heaving with cherry jam and vanilla bean ice cream swirled with more pie chunks. Founders Erin Forden and Maddie Nehlen started making their small-batch pastry-inspired ice cream in June 2024 in their apartment kitchens, and they hand-deliver pints across New York. Nehlan’s personal favorite is their first, Coney Island Queens. “It’s vanilla bean ice cream with homemade cone pieces, chocolate swirl, and rainbow sprinkles. So simple, but so nostalgic!” she says. Forden, however, loves the Apple Pear Crisp: “The brown sugar ice cream is so rich and creamy, and the full flavor truly tastes like warm apple crisp with ice cream on top, which immediately makes me think of my mom’s baking.”
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“While the virality has obviously gotten us to where we are today, we try not to obsess over manufacturing the next viral moment,” says Nehlen. “We’re both excited and passionate about what we’re doing.” To meet the demand—and though it’s still just the two of them—they’ve moved into a commercial kitchen space and grown production eight-fold.
With more wintry themes planned, neither Forden nor Nehlen sees ice cream as a summer-only dessert. “For me, being cozy on the couch and eating right out of the pint has no season!” says Nehlen. In 2025, the pair are set to expand into private events, with custom orders and select retail partners to grow Betty Jo’s presence. “We’ll continue to lean into seasonality, and definitely bring back some of our big hits from 2024.” January, they note, calls for something citrussy.
In London’s leafy De Beauvoir Town, the newly opened The Dreamery is also making a salient case for all-seasons ice cream. The artisanal ice cream and wine bar, which sits in a former butchers and greengrocer’s shop, is the third component of Alex Young and George De Vos’s business, having opened wine and small plates bar Goodbye Horses and coffee spot Day Trip earlier in 2024. “We originally planned to open in August, but we had the usual opening hold-ups,” says De Vos. “We can be enthusiastic about ice cream no matter the season. People eat soup in summer, so…”
The interiors are full-on whimsy, with folkloric murals by artist Lucy Stein: a cow with an ice-cream cone on its head like a wannabe unicorn, snails and aliens, a smiling sun always beating down. Mirrors make it feel like an infinite dreamscape. The countertop acts as the bar, with the silver cylinders housing opening flavors: gingerbread; an almost savory fig leaf, oolong, and prune; mellow sorbets. Buxom scoops sit in silver coupes with delicate Victorian spoons. When I visit, I opt for a little scoop of coffee gelato, which uses spent coffee from their supplier Lucid—it’s robust and rich, offering a bold pick-me-up on a grey London day.
De Vos cites Paris’s Folderol as an inspiration—the ice cream and wine bar had to hire a bouncer to manage its crowds after a wave of TikTok fame. The Dreamery’s unexpected location in a residential neighborhood adds to its playfulness: it’s a destination, a treat for locals, and a delight to stumble upon all at once. Also, one could easily spend the day bopping from Day Trip to The Dreamery and Goodbye Horses—or the reverse—and discovering there’s fun to be had with combinations and mismatches of wine and ice cream. “It’s all about joy,” says De Vos. “We don’t push people to match. We can see sweetness working with sweetness, or high acidity profile wines cut through that—Muscato with residual sugar, an acidic Reisling, a spritzy Beaujolais.”
Chefs Jack Coggins and Will Golden are continuing to develop The Dreamery’s flavors. “We devise the flavors based on what we’re feeling and work according to what’s in season or what we’ve preserved—like the pear sorbet and fig leaf ice cream—or what we’re wasting—like spent coffee.” Toppings are playful, like a popcorn-infused sabayon and a classic butterscotch sauce, and they’re soon set to expand beyond gelato into frozen desserts. “We’ve got a Snickers ice-cream style bar in our sights, along with a riff on a Feast,” says Coggins. “Gelato-wise, the possibilities are endless. We’re excited to see what we can work with from our suppliers. If we were waiting on the sun to eat ice cream or drink cold wine, then we’d be doing very little business across the year. It’s an ideology.”
Ice cream may be about pleasure, but some innovators are taking a more intellectual approach, too—just take historian and ice cream maker Hannah Spiegelman, the founder of A Sweet History. Since 2017, she’s created over 250 unique flavors inspired by history, art, mythology, pop culture, and personal narratives. “I describe myself as an ice cream artist—I use ice cream, a universally beloved food, as my medium to help people experience the past in a new way,” she says. “I want my ice cream to be delicious, but I also want it to spark intrigue. I rigorously research every flavor to ensure each component works together to tell a story.” In 2024, Spiegelman created two sweets inspired by Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn—one being a milk thistle ice cream with chocolate birthday cake soil and chocolate-covered Jagermeister cordial cherries—and in 2025, she’ll be working on projects that turn ice cream into sculptural art.
What unites all of these strands of non-traditional ice cream making? Whether the backdrop is a Mallorcan sunset, a foggy Amsterdam canal, or a chilly London street at dusk, they’re designed to be enjoyed in any climate or at any time of year. “They have a saying in Dutch: ‘You’re not made of sugar, you won’t melt in the rain,’” says Caldwell. “In Amsterdam, you’re not guaranteed ‘ice cream weather,’ so why wait until then to enjoy something delicious?’ Whether you’re adding a lug of olive oil to your Ben Jerry’s or finding yourself charmed by the idea of chorizo crumb over chocolate, there’s never been a better time not to skip dessert.
