Restaurant Review: Fro-Yo in the City

In a city crowded with new frozen-yogurt spots, Madison Fare is a standout.Photographs by Lanna Apisukh for The New Yorker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.Frozen yogurt comes in swirls, obviously, but it comes in waves, too, following the crests and crashes of the trend cycle, each fro-yo reflective of its era. The concept hit critical mass in the fitness-freak nineteen-eighties, but by the late two-thousands chains such as Pinkberry and Red Mango had inspired a craze for giant tubs of the stuff buried under sugary mountains of candy toppings. In the twenty-tens, fro-yo seemed briefly eclipsed, in New York, at least, by a mania for ice cream—your Ample Hills, your Morgenstern’s, your Caffè Panna. But now frozen yogurt is indisputably back. Have you seen the lines out the door? Even Van Leeuwen, a trailblazer of the fancy-ice-cream movement, has put it on tap. The style currently consuming New York is more elegant, more restrained than the fro-yos of yore; these are sophisticated yogurts, minimalist yet indulgent, a gastronomic version of old-money European vacations, or of our never-ending fascination with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy—thin, tasteful, never trying too hard. Still, the one thing every fro-yo wave has in common is a sheen of virtue: frozen yogurt, with its not-too-sweetness and lactic tang and ambient implication of protein, can plausibly be branded as a health food, even if we all know it isn’t much of one.

This time around, the Upper East Side is the epicenter of the fro-yo explosion—draw from this whatever demographic inferences you will. Butterfield Market, the fancy-schmancy grocery store that’s recently been attracting crowds for its viral “dot cakes,” has been serving frozen yogurt for what feels like forever, but its version is not especially notable. Compared with the wonders of the grocery aisles, the topping options are fairly generic (sprinkles, chopped-up berries), and the yogurt is so mild that you’ll just have to take it on faith that it isn’t ice cream. Fro-yo heads will tell you, conspiratorially, that Butterfield Market is rumored to have the same supplier as Forty Carrots, the café tucked away on the seventh floor of Bloomingdale’s which claims to have introduced frozen yogurt to New York City some fifty years ago. They do taste awfully similar, generically sweet and cold, rather than funky and tart, as I like my frozen yogurt.

You’ll do far better if you walk to Eighty-eighth and Madison and dip into the small, cool Madison Fare, a specialty-foods-and-candy storefront opened, in 2022, by the chef Amin Kinana, whose frozen-yogurt creations are, by my estimation, unreserved works of art. The yogurt itself is dense and almost puckeringly sour, and oh, my God, the toppings. They’re some of the most spectacular toppings I’ve ever encountered, an array of ritzy, globe-spanning garnishes that evoke the posh worldliness of peak-era Dean & DeLuca: snowy cubes of Turkish delight, cinnamon-dusted pecans, bitter cocoa nibs, pistachio knafeh, vibrant edible flowers, honey on the comb, actual honest-to-goodness raspberry coulis. At many of the ultra-trendy fro-yo spots I’ve visited lately, the sundaes seem more optimized for photography than for consumption. Many of these magnificent-looking concoctions fail the most fundamental test of a summery treat: do I want to eat every single bite, and maybe even go back for more? Mimi’s in Nolita, which, of all my stops, draws the longest and most youthful lines, is the apotheosis of the problem: pretty, and pricey, and utterly fine. Interview magazine recently built a portfolio around the actor Alia Shawkat tasting the city’s most viral frozen yogurts; of a Mimi’s specimen, she declared, correctly, that it was good but “not that good.” The line you’re waiting in at Mimi’s is, essentially, a line for content. At Madison Fare, by contrast, the toppings maximalism lands you somewhere genuinely delicious, and often surprising.