United States
New York
Can a city that borrowed every one of its ice-cream traditions beat the places that invented them?
New York's claim is that it imported its ice cream and then built traditions of its own out of it. Sicilian granita became Italian ice in a Queens garage in 1944, and that lineage promptly split: one family's Corona storefront has never opened a second shop in eighty years, while another branch grew from a 1928 street trade into a chain of around ninety. The egg cream — a drink containing neither egg nor cream — is still made and defended by national competition in a restored 1920s pharmacy in Carroll Gardens. In Chinatown a family has sold lychee and durian alongside vanilla since 1978, and the founder's daughter runs the shop now. Above all of it sits a craft generation supplying the city's own restaurant kitchens and writing Harlem, Gujarat and the Caribbean into an ice-cream base.
Last checked 2026-08-21
The selected spots
6 selected
- 01
The Lemon Ice King of Corona
italian ice · Mike Zampino and Vincent Barbaccia, who bought it from Peter Benfaremo
The plainest available answer to what New York's own frozen-dessert tradition looks like: Sicilian granita, carried into a Corona garage in 1944, churned small-batch into something creamier without a drop of dairy in it. Thirty-two flavours, never mixed, under the hand-painted sign of the owner before last. Eighty years and it has never opened a second shop.
- 02
Eddie's Sweet Shop
ice cream · Vito Citrano, who inherited the shop from his father Giuseppe
The closest thing New York has to an unbroken soda fountain: eighteen flavours hand-whipped on vintage equipment, syrups and whipped cream made by hand, under a wood-and-marble interior that has not been refitted since the 1920s. The Citrano family bought it in 1968 and their first decision was to leave it alone.
- 03
il laboratorio del gelato
gelato · Jon Snyder
Twenty-four years of one maker's single production kitchen on Ludlow Street, still making everything by hand in small batches and still supplying the city's own restaurant kitchens. Jon Snyder had already built and sold one gelato company before he opened this one alone in 2002; the nuts are roasted and the fruit processed on the premises.
- 04
Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
ice cream · Philip Seid, founder, and his daughter Christina Seid
An immigrant-founded shop whose Asian-American flavour list was not a borrowing but the point, from 1978, and is still made by the founder's family at the same Bayard Street address. Its menu was shaped by customers asking for things — durian arrived that way, over the shop's own objections.
- 05
Sugar Hill Creamery
ice cream · Petrushka Bazin Larsen and Nick Larsen
A husband-and-wife shop whose flavour language comes from the founders' own Caribbean and Midwestern families rather than from a trend list, made in small batches and kept entirely within Harlem across three storefronts. It also runs on its own calendar: summer hours begin when it has felt like spring for five days straight.
- 06
Malai
ice cream · Pooja Bavishi
A shop that treats South Asian flavour as its first language rather than as a seasonal gesture, on an eggless base churned with little air, founded and still led by Pooja Bavishi from the Smith Street flagship it started in.
Research notes
City boundary
The five boroughs of New York City — Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Not Westchester, not New Jersey, and no further onto Long Island than the Queens and Brooklyn line.