Damn you Dessert Truck.
Not only have you infiltrated my evening stomping grounds in the East Village, as well as my work-days in Midtown, but just as I was growing immune to the lure of your chocolate bread pudding you’ve unleashed something even more irresistible.
Like the creamiest of pie fillings topped with toasted marshmallows and crunchy sugar-roasted pecans, this pumpkin custard is the perfect autumn snack. It’s a good thing it’s jacket season too because soon I might need to camouflage my many, many indulgences in this treat.
I promise to shut up about Dessert Truck now.
Dessert Truck - Park Ave and 52nd St. Mon-Fri 12pm-4pm and on Third Ave and St. Mark’s every day 6pm-midnight
Fans of Magnolia Bakery’s famously sweet cupcakes, rejoice. Now you no longer need to schlep downtown for a dose of that toothache-inducing buttercream frosting. Magnolia has just opened an under-the-radar outpost (no signage yet?) on the corner of 49th street and 6th avenue–tourist central and spitting distance from about a million snackish office workers.
There’s a bit more selection here than I remember in the West Village location, and I’ll probably check out the promising-looking cheesecake, cookies, and various other treats when I’m craving something sweet. My peanut butter bar with heath candy bar crumbled on top ($2.50) was a delightful, if intense, post-lunch pick-me-up. But unsurprisingly, all the action here is around the cupcake window. I have to be honest: I never understood what made these cupcakes so damn special, besides the shout-out on Sex in the City, but at least here they are behind a pane of glass. In the downtown location, shoppers graze their coat-sleeves through frosting as they serve themselves in a kind of dog-eat-dog cupcake frenzy. Also, there wasn’t a line out the door in the 49th street spot–not yet, anyway. I think that is what bothered me about Magnolia in the West Village; not that people were eating those cupcakes, but that they would stand in a line wrapped around the block for half an hour in the freezing cold to eat those cupcakes. I was fooled once; I got in the line, thinking there might be something unbelievably delicious hidden under all that pastel frosting; there wasn’t. It was a cupcake, no more, no less. Needless to say, I haven’t recovered from my disappointment.
Magnolia Bakery 1240 Sixth Avenue, at 49th Street
Today Dessert Truck posted this notification on Facebook: “Our daytime spot will be Park Ave between 51st and 53rd Sts. We’ll be somewhere along the two blocks. We’ll be serving our regular menu and will be open from 11:30AM - 4PM. In case we have any parking issues, please bear with us as we work out the kinks for daytime service. If you’re working in the area, do stop by, even just to say hi! Also, if you could let anyone else who works in the area know that we’ll be there, we would really appreciate it.”
If you work in midtown, then you may well know the sad predicament you find yourself in when the clock on your desktop strikes one, you can smell your coworker’s french fries through your cubicle walls, and you’re having trouble focusing on your css/spreadsheet/proposal/whatever through the hunger pains. You really don’t want to go to some packed, over-priced buffet-style mess hall, so you find yourself at Starbucks, washing a stale scone down with a caramelly beverage, feeling fat and unhappy. Well now you can feel fat and happy scarfing down a tasty $5 dessert cup from the truck. I came down kinda hard on Dessert Truck, because of the weird cake-batter texture of their chocolate bread pudding, but after I wrote about it they started adding a few chunks of bread onto the top of each cup, which kinda won me over. I think there is - or used to be - a decent Indian cart serving up $5 plates on 53rd St. near Park Avenue, so you can make a meal of it.
The Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream truck sits in a sunbeam on a quiet cobblestoned street in Soho, like an upscale Mr. Softee waiting to be discovered by the hordes crossing Prince Street. Unlike a truck with an irksome jingle, however, Van Leeuwan quietly exudes class, from the gentle yellow color and elegant font used on the vehicle, to the flavors list, which ruminates on the high-quality ingredients used in its ice cream.
There’s some examples of this globe-trotting, gourmand-speak on the web site: hormone-free milk from cows that graze “in pastures in the foothills of the Adirondacks,” vanilla beans harvested from “organic bourbon and Tahitian vanilla orchids grown in Papua New Guinea,” pistachios grown “in the rugged lands of Bronte, in southern Italy.” I expected that the thoughtfulness employed to pick and present these ingredients would also produce a tastier-than-average ice cream. But while this is different from your average cone, it’s not exactly mind-blowing stuff.
If you’ve ever had homemade ice cream, that’s what it’s like–a bit icy in texture, and lacking in the upfront flavor and cloying sweetness. I thought that Van Leeuwan’s product tasted fresh and clean, but this was probably mostly a result of how it was presented. I sampled the Currants and Cream ($3.95 for a small) first, and ended up eating all the tart little frozen currants, leaving the uninteresting cream behind in a trash can. The subtle frozen heat in the Ginger flavor was intriguing, but quickly grew boring with only a few bursts of candied ginger in the mix. The winner of the three I tried was the Giandijia, a blend of hazlenut and Michel Cluizel chocolate. It had a subtle rich chocolate flavor, nicely balanced with earthy hazlenut, with a creamier texture than the other two.
While I’m a little confused by the paradox of an environmentally-friendly ice cream truck (how much gas does it take to fill that thing, let alone air-lift pistachios from Italy?), the use of some local, small-farm products and cups made from natural fibers is a nice touch. Plus the location alone, in the wilds of uber-luxurious Soho, makes it a refreshing pit-stop after an exhausting day of shopping. Be sure to get your artisanal ice cream fix before the last lazy days of summer slip away.
Van Leeuwen ice cream truck - Greene Street between Prince and Spring Street from 1pm-8pm; University Place between 11th and 12th St. 8-11pm.
Check their site for more locations.
Remember when Tasti D-lite was the king of low-calorie soft-serve? No more. In the past eighten months, “real” frozen yogurt shops have sprouted all across Manhattan, and the boom shows no signs of slowing. Last month yet another, 16 Handles, opened up on Second Avenue not far from the new Pinkberry on St. Mark’s Place, (with a buy-one-get-one-free offer for August). It seemed like overkill, but I was hopeful. Maybe 16 Handles can save me from my Pinkberry addiction.
Not long ago I silently mocked the lines winding out of each newly-opened Pinkberry, packed with people willing to shell out $6 for a cup of sleekly-packaged swirly girly low-cal dessert something, for no one was quite sure if it was really yogurt, or a batch of chemicals–not that anyone really cared. But then Pinkberry got its frosty fangs in me. The concoction is creamy, tart, and sweet at first taste, then the flavor gently fades, leaving you face-down in your cup, chasing that initial tang all the way to the bottom. Topped with enough supersized, abnormally-perfect raspberries and blackberries to make it acceptably healthy, each costly cup of this embarrassingly compelling stuff drove me from the bright shop into the shadows, blissfully snacking and hating myself at the same time.
I tried Red Mango, an Asian import which has recently landed on 14th street and claims the Pinkberry entreprenuers swiped its yogurt concept; it wasn’t the same. I missed that tarty zing–that sugary something–that ineffable Pinkberryness…
16 Handles‘ plain tart yogurt is pretty close to what I require in a frozen yogurt. The whole place is self serve, and offers 16 rotating flavors (chocolate, raspberry tart, and mango sorbet stood out to me), and a salad-bar sized selection of toppings from fresh fruit to yogurt chips, granola, ground-up butterfingers, and long-forgotten breakfast cereals like cinnamon toast crunch (hmmm). I liked being able to control how much of everything went into my cup and pay by weight–I ended up shelling out $4.09 for my strawberry-and-mango-studded creation instead of the requisite $6.23 for the Pinkberry three-topping medium. But be sure to come armed with a little self-control, or it could get expensive.
I have one critique–the little wooden eco-spoons were awful. Fro-yo needs to be lapped from smooth white plastic, not off a splintery surface. If you dare to go on the front lines of the yogurt war, dash around the corner and get yourself a proper spoon from Pinkberry on St. Mark’s Place.
16 Handles 153 Second Ave. between 9th and 10th Street