Soft serve is in — in Michelins, pizza joints, barber shops, cafes, and evidently, our dreams. Once kept in the company of hot dogs and childhood memories, this nostalgic and endlessly-customizable machine-churned dessert has become a mainstay on high-profile menus. While trying to determine why, chefs resoundingly countered me with a better question: Why not?
Mission hotspot Ernest, which has attracted the Michelin inspector eye, leans into a classic soft serve base with elevated toppings. Their hazelnut sundae, which hasn’t budged from the menu since the restaurant’s second week in business, features homemade vanilla soft serve covered in a toasted hazelnut and vanilla praline sauce and finished at the table with a dark chocolate magic shell à la Smuckers.
“I don't think I'll ever change it. I love this stuff so much,” said chef-owner Brandon Rice. Ernest — and the hazelnut sundae — is approaching its five-year anniversary this month.
Don’t let its humble digs fool you: During the recipe development process, Rice approached this crowd-pleaser with the scrutiny of a savant and the excitement of a child scurrying on the beach. After months of research, he found inspiration in the most unassuming and yet, one of the most nostalgic, places.
“Costco was by far the best… Costco just aerates the shit out of their soft serve and that's why it's so light and fluffy,” said Rice. “And I love that texture of soft serve on your tongue — when you like, mash it between your tongue and the roof of your mouth and it's just the smoothest texture you've ever had. It's my favorite part about it.”
(If Costco’s fluffy soft serve also tops the ranks for you, you might have the Iron Lady to thank for helping develop an emulsifier that let manufacturers whip more air into soft serve formulas.)
Nostalgia seems to be the common thread among soft-servers. “For us, the whole concept for the pizzeria and pizza shop is centered around nostalgia,” said Ryan Pollnow, co-executive chef of Flour + Water. “And for us, soft serve fits right into that same nostalgia.”
At Angler, an upscale seafood restaurant with live-fire cooking on the Embarcadero, Chef Joe Hou says that cooking, like soft serve, is “very based on nostalgia.”
“I think having some at the end of the meal kind of ties it all together,” he said.
Angler makes their soft serve in-house and doesn’t add any additional flavors to the base blend to “let it speak for itself.” They top it with their ember caramel, made from cream steeped with real embers from the fire they cook with. The result is a cold and refreshing, yet rich and smokey dessert that sells like hell.
Unlike in-your-face swings at evoking childlike wonder, such as the Cosmic Brownie hype over at Manhattan eatery Tatiana (“To be quite honest, it’s just a fucking brownie,” Tatiana chef-owner Kwame Onwuachi said in 2024), soft serve doesn’t rely on the separation between the “good old days” and now to sell. It’s remained relevant and ubiquitous, never falling out of style or trending too hard to burn out.
It’s also blissfully simple. Once a kitchen commits to the machinery, the process is fairly simple and uses just a few ingredients. Many of the soft serve-makers found in kitchens are either Taylor or Carpigiani, both of which are easy-to-service and hardy machines.
In Ernest’s case, Rice opted for a soft serve machine over a pastry chef.
“I can get this set up, make it super super delicious, and then it just turns into a daily recipe that gets made and it doesn't need to change,” said Rice.
Other kitchens don’t have the oven space for other desserts. The massive pizza ovens at Flour + Water are set to 600 degrees — a hostile temperature for most baked goods — for 11 hours of the day.
Moreover, all of the kitchens in the company’s pizza shop locations in North Beach, Mission Rock, and Oakland are completely electric: “They're small-footprint, small-square-foot spaces. And so, equipment's limited,” said Pollnow. “Which was even more reason to have a simplified dessert offering that still ticks that box of delicious, craveable, and,” — there it is again — “nostalgic.”
Valley Ford Creamery in Petaluma supplies Flour + Water with its soft serve base made from Jersey cows. While essentially flavorless, it’s referred to as fior di latte, or “flower of milk” in Italian. Traditionally, fior di latte is considered the purest expression of the animal’s milk and is widely used as a benchmark to gauge the quality of gelatos in Italy.
Pollnow says they love this particular soft serve because the Jersey cows’ milk is naturally higher in butter fat, at around 5 to 6 percent, compared to standard dairy cows at 3 to 4 percent. Oftentimes, when making ice cream or gelato, cream and milk are mixed together to hit an ideal butterfat content of about 8 percent — the higher the cow’s butterfat content, the less intervention required. (Back when the economy was okay, Flour + Water's old supplier Double 8 Dairy, which was purchased by Valley Ford in 2023, used to make mozzarella and soft serve with water buffalo milk; they switched completely to Jersey cows recently.)
In addition to their fior di latte, the Flour + Water pizzerias offer a salted caramel soft serve. Their toppings include more refined options such as olive oil and sea salt, Amarena cherries, and house-made brown butter cereal crunch, but one could spring for classic options like chocolate sauce and rainbow sprinkles.
Others are leaving the sprinkles behind and making soft serve a thing of the future. At San Ho Won, soft serve is a menu mainstay, though both the flavors and base recipe itself changes seasonally. Currently, they’re offering a black sesame soft serve with huckleberries or a strawberry soft serve with makgeolli, yogurt, and nurungji, a crisped rice.
“Sometimes we use the same base and other times, we make a new one with different ingredients,” said executive sous chef Thomas Etheve. “Sometimes, it's a very different texture, different viscosity.”
Past flavors include a dairyless tangerine sorbet, misugaru and soy sauce, roasted buckwheat, and banana milk. With their classic two-flavor machine, San Ho Won offers one lighter and one richer option to be eaten alone or twisted.
“It’s the ideal dessert to have at the end of the meal, especially the food we're serving, Korean barbecue,” said Etheve. “We like the idea of how refreshing it is after all the meats and the rice and the soup. And, also in a very cool and casual way to present dessert.”
Soft serve in sit-down restaurants isn’t a new concept. The New York Times documented a wave of soft serve nearly 20 years ago, and many attribute Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi for her work in popularizing the trend. In 2007, Tosi, then working as Momofuku’s pastry chef, was tasked with launching a dessert program that wouldn’t slow down the line cooks. She landed on soft serve: Easy to iterate on, can be prepped ahead of time, requires no kitchen station or cook, and is a crowd-pleaser through and through.
It’s been referred to as a “dessert crutch” — but what separates a crutch from something simply classic? “A lot of the things that we do are based on food memory whether it's something we grew up with or something formative and then we’re preparing it in a more contemporary way,” said Hou.
A long list of spots offer incredible soft serve in the city, from Souvla’s tangy Greek yogurt with honey to Che Fico’s sorbettos and gelatos to Matcha Cafe Maiko’s matcha cone to Side A’s soft serve affogato with The Coffee Movement espresso. You can even get some after a quick fade from The Barb in Bernal Heights, which has a counter-service window.
With endless riffing opportunities, ease of operations, and a consistently tasty product, it’s no wonder why soft serve is being dished out by trucks de ice cream and chefs de cuisine alike.
