🍦 Soft Serve, Hard Opinions🍦
Also in this entry, 🐞🪞
Soft Serve, Hard Opinions 🍦
I love vanilla ice cream. And if it’s soft serve—day-changing, mood-lifting, recalibrate-your-afternoon levels of love. It has to be in a cup, with a spoon. I do not want to walk around licking it from a cone. Vanilla is both the baseline and the benchmark for me. The low bar and the high bar.
When it’s right, a good vanilla soft serve hits instantly—bright, cold, nostalgic, and completely present. It doesn’t need sprinkles or a twist.
I recently found a list of “best soft serve in NYC” from another Substack (linked below), and while it had good picks, it left out a few personal greats.
So here we are.
🍦Vanilla Worth Talking About
Caffe Panna (Irving Place + Greenpoint)
Fior di Panna is what you order if you understand restraint. Just cream and milk, done impeccably. It’s not trying to wow you—it just does. There are toppings and mix-ins, but honestly? The soft serve on its own is a reason to go. Is it actually vanilla? No, but definitely a half-sib. What might be even more transcendent than the soft serve is their vanilla ice cream—supreme in taste, flavor, and, yes, chew. You’ll know exactly what I mean when you try it.
Softside (SoHo + Brooklyn + UWS)
Softside’s vanilla is quietly excellent. It leans malted—just enough to give it depth without going full milkshake. This is for people who can taste the difference between malted vanilla, French vanilla, and classic American “optic white” vanilla. If that distinction means something to you, this is worth the price.
It melts fast—almost like it knows what it’s worth. BTW this stand is seasonal so check for its existence depending on the time of year. I found out the hard way when I optimistically hiked to it on a sunny January day.
And Now… At Home Soft Serve.
A new era, quietly ushered in by frozen dairy and clever packaging.
(Random pic from internet, not my lovely clean polish-free nails)
🦘CVT Vanilla Soft Serve Pouch (CVS, yes really)
I found this in the freezer case at CVS while actively avoiding the line at Caffe Panna. It’s a frozen pouch of soft serve (like baby food for people with taste), and yes, I paid $5.79 for it because, Manhattan. You thaw it for about 10–15 minutes, then squeeze it out like a deeply unserious gelato.
It’s sweeter than I usually like—definitely not in the same category as the others—but in the privacy of your home, it will absolutely do the job. I wouldn’t want anyone to see the speed with which I consumed this directly from the pouch, and that’s probably the best endorsement I can give.
🦘RoseBud Soft Serve Pouch (Untried, but putting it on your radar)
The packaging is great. The name sounds like a perfume. And I’m still hunting down their soft serve pouches in the wild after seeing their pints on DoorDash. Will report back if the vanilla is as elegant as the name.
🍦 Yes, McDonald’s
That barely-there vanilla, the way it balances sweet and cold and fake in the exact right way... it's the original template. I stand by it. No Link provided by me.
🍦🍦🍦🍦P.S. This 2022 list is what originally sent me down the soft serve spiral. It’s full of solid picks that still hold up.🍦🍦🍦🍦
🪞 The Fifth Shelf🪞
A rotating little corner of the internet for things that are beautiful, unnecessary, and hard to stop thinking about. Nothing here is seasonal or sensible. It’s just something I saw and thought: you might like this.
This week’s shelf item:
Ladybug Bottle Opener by L’Objet
Link → Neiman Marcus 🐞
A 24k gold-plated ladybug, made solely for prying the cap off something fizzy. Not champagne — something more humble. A cold bottle of French lemonade, perhaps.
It’s decorative, but also… not. You will use it more than you think. You’ll call it practical. And if anyone asks why you have it, just say: “It’s for important bottles.”
Thanks for reading.
More soon — probably about pizza, possibly about wallpaper, definitely about something I’ve spent too much time thinking about.
— S.