Amid the dimly lit tables at Táma in Chicago slips a puzzling contradiction: a savory ice cream that is neither dinner nor dessert but is completely, confoundingly delicious.
Táma’s head chef, Avgeria Stapaki, serves her salty manchego ice cream, funked up by the addition of shaved truffles, over a warm bubble of the restaurant’s signature focaccia. The whole dish is stabbed through the middle with a bread knife as if Stapaki were worried it might scamper off the plate. And in a way, it does, as the ice cream melts like butter over the steaming yeasty bread.
Táma’s funky, cheesy delight is one of many ice creams across the country that are making the leap from sweet to savory. Some are salty, some just a tinge sugary; many blur the line between the two, while others are leaving the dessert menu behind altogether.
In Chicago, there’s a caviar, cucumber, and hazelnut milkshake on the menu at dinner-party-meets-fine-dining restaurant Class Act. At La Licor Panamericana, chef Juan Jiménez is perfecting an earthy chileatole-verde-inspired ice cream, a blend of roasted poblanos, corn, and epazote. In Manhattan, a celery root ice cream floats in a briny celeriac soda at Smithereens, and at Echelon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, savory corn ice cream gets topped with a glistening dollop of caviar.
You’ve likely seen a savory-sweet scoop on your socials too. Content creator Laila Mirza of @lailas_pantry says food influencers are cashing in on the shock factor of novel flavors. “We’re consuming so much content, so only things that make you go, ‘WTF is that?’ will make you stop and watch,” Mirza says. Her recent caprese-inspired basil ice cream with tomato chutney and balsamic vinegar swirl garnered thousands of views, outperforming the next four videos she posted. Plus, it whipped up the morbid curiosity she was hoping for. “helpp im all for diverse flavours but this js did not sit right w me😭 but would love to try thiss,” reads one comment.
Meijie Liao, who posts recipes as @daywithmei on Instagram, says ice cream is the perfect canvas for shock factor—familiar enough for audiences to recognize the format even if the flavors are unfamiliar. “Ice cream is universal enough that we can push the envelope a little bit on the flavor itself, but not so much that we’re serving people like a frozen hunk of cheese.” Dessert-saturated social media has played a role too, she says. It’s exposed audiences to desserts from other cultures, and that’s made them more receptive to unfamiliar flavors. Liao often draws on savory flavors from her Chinese background when creating recipes like her bamboo toasted rice ice cream.
On some dessert menus, corn gets recontextualized to play on memory. Garrett Schlichte, a writer and chef at Campette Roadhouse in Phillipsville, California, added grilled corn and brown butter ice cream to the menu. Topped with a salty Corn Nut brittle and served in a corn-cob-shaped ceramic tray, the dessert feels like eating roasted corn at the county fair—total kitsch. The charred kernels add smokiness to the dish, which is flecked through with bits of burnt corn that resemble vanilla bean.
It strikes a fun balance between high and low, Schlichte says. “It’s this custard-based, velvety, hours-long ice cream process, with corn nuts that I literally bought at the gas station down the street.”
“I was very much a french fries in your Frosty at Wendy’s kind of kid,” Schlichte says, adding that savory ice cream’s popularity is tapping into a similar nostalgia. As the future feels uncertain, people want something simultaneously new and comforting.
