New York City has officially reached the point where you can order a dirty martini as soft serve. Honestly, we should have seen this coming.
Unnecessary is now open at 66 Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, bringing cocktail-inspired ice cream to NYC from the team behind the acclaimed cocktail bar Double Chicken Please. The concept takes the creativity and precision of a cocktail program and turns it into something you can eat with a tiny spoon.
The headline act is, naturally, the Dirty Martini soft serve. It’s made with flavors inspired by the classic cocktail—including olive, fennel, juniper and dry vermouth—and finished with an olive. It’s briny, herbal and salty, which is a sentence you probably never expected to read about ice cream.
But Unnecessary isn’t stopping at martinis.
The rotating menu also features wildly inventive flavors such as Garibaldi, inspired by the Italian cocktail with orange and Campari, and Matcha Grasshopper, a grown-up spin on mint chocolate chip featuring fresh mint, white chocolate, coconut water and Japanese matcha. Some flavors contain alcohol, while others simply borrow the flavors of cocktails.
The project comes from Double Chicken Please co-founders GN Chan and Faye Chen, along with Frank Zheng, with Taiwanese ice cream chef Yu Lee leading the culinary side. And because apparently serving bizarrely delicious ice cream wasn’t enough, the space also doubles as a listening lounge, with custom speakers, vintage audio equipment and DJ sets.
For anyone searching for new NYC dessert spots, Lower East Side ice cream, unusual ice cream flavors or the best soft serve in NYC, Unnecessary is officially worth adding to the list.
It’s unnecessary.
It’s also very necessary.
And somewhere, a bartender is wondering why nobody thought of this sooner.
