Nation's Restaurant News - March 22, 2010

Food&Beverage
• What’s Hot: Chicago • The Kruse Report
Cool new twists

Chefs update soft serve with innovative flavors, toppings l BY pamela parseghian

Bill Kim tore out the large spresso machine at his new Belly Shack restau- rant in Chicago to make room for a soft-serve ice cream dispenser. He figured he’d make more money from the soft serve than from hot beverages. He was right. In fact, the frozen dessert has been so profitable, he plans to buy a new, faster ma-

Winning and
losing desserts
at new restaurants

Nightwood
Location: Chicago
Pastry chef: Melissa Trimmer
Best selling: seasonal warm
cookie tray, $7
Slowest selling: sweet-potato
tart with toasted pecans and
caramel topping, $8

chine this August, he said.

Kim and others across the country are finding strong sales in fun and unusual soft-serve flavors, such as coconut water, olive oil and those reminiscent of kids’ breakfast cereals. And this spring, as the weather warms, they expect the interest in soft serve to grow even more.

“Soft serve is cheap, and you can make good money on it,” Kim said, noting that the product is also cost-effective and consistent.

If you are using a machine to make all your desserts, “you don’t need a $40,000 pastry chef,” he said. The equipment “is going to show up every day and not complain.” Kim also noted that once a formula is devised for an ice cream base, the machine dispenses a consistent product.

So he plans to buy a new “top-of-the-line” model for about $16,000. It will be able to dispense two flavors in twists. And he’ll move the older one to the back of his kitchen so he can offer a third flavor.

His cur-
rent flavor is
coconut water.
After testing a
richer coconut
milk, he found it
was too fatty to
work in the soft-serve machine.

To prepare his soft-serve ice cream, Kim purchases fresh young coconuts for $18 per case of nine. The case yields about 3 quarts of water. He adds that to a chilled, basic crème anglaise made in house with whole milk.

The coconut water, which is touted as healthful by some purveyors, “has a subtle and faint flavor,” Kim explained, and it makes the soft serve “a lot lighter.”

The coconut water-flavored soft serve at Belly Shack in Chicago can be served with such toppings as, from top, mint brownie, blondie and bacon chocolate chip.

Noca
Location: Phoenix
Pastry chef consultant:

Kriss Harvey

Best selling: sticky toffee pudding with Greek yogurt gelato and fresh lime, $8

Slowest selling:

deconstructed cheesecake, with crunch strawberry sorbet, pistachio coulis, white chocolate, yuzu toffee, $8

Recette Location: New York Pastry chef: Christina Lee Best selling: s’more with house-made graham cracker ice cream, toasted marshmallow and “hot” chocolate sauce, $8 Slowest selling: coconut panna cotta with white chocolate, $8

He offers five toppings: huckleberry-lime, Vietnamese cinnamon caramel, bacon chocolate chip, mint brownie and blondie.

Pastry chef Mindy Se-gal of Hot Chocolate restaurant in Chicago makes the last three.

The top-selling “bacon chocolate chip” choice has pieces of bacon and chunks of Segal’s chocolate chip cookies that she prepares with bacon fat. It’s sort of like baking with lard, and it adds a little salty taste, Kim said.

At Belly Shack, which Kim opened late last year, he sells about 55 soft serves a day to his

daily average of 200 customers, in the middle of the winter in Chicago, he said.

Kim offers 4-ounce portions for $4, and he has a 20-per- cent food cost, he said. He believes his soft serve is popular because it’s a familiar food that takes guests back to their childhoods.

He said he fondly remembers having frozen custard in the Chicago suburbs where he spent his high school years.

Reawakening
the inner child

“I wanted to take
people back to their
childhood” with the soft
serve offered at the new
Sampan restaurant in
Philadelphia, said own-
er Michael Schulson.
“It’s fun.”
He offers such fla-
vors as roasted blue-
berry Pop-Tarts, man-
go Gummy Bears and
Froot Loops. They come
in mini cones “the size
of your thumb,” and
three to an order placed
on a stand for $6. His
flavor consultant is his
“Fifty percent of the flavors are
thought up by my son,” he said.

The chef steeps flavoring ingredients for 12 to 24 hours in an ice cream base, then strains out the items before adding the remaining liquid to the soft-serve machine because it cannot dispense a chunky mixture. Soft serve is the only dessert on Sampan’s menu.

“People told me I was crazy,” Schulson said, so he has two other desserts available for anyone who asks for an alternative. But he sells very few of those.

Like Kim, part of Schulson’s impetus for offering soft serve was to cut costs by not needing a pastry chef. He also has found an inexpensive way to get the word out each time he whips up a new soft-serve flavor: He tweets about it, sometimes offering minimal clues, such as a photo of a Blueberry Pop-Tarts box.