At your soft service!
Here’s something for people who love dessert and hate social interactions: a soft serve-ice-cream vending machine.
The trailblazing treat landed last week at Bar Moxy, at the Moxy Times Square. The hotel’s executive chef, Jason Hall, first spotted the gizmo at a trade show in Chicago. When he heard that no American restaurants were using one yet, Hall knew he had to procure one — for the good of the city. “We wanted it to be a New York thing,” Hall tells The Post, adding that the machines are manufactured in America and popular in Asia.
To give the appliance some New York ’tude, Hall asked Curtis Kulig — a wellknown street artist and a friend from Hall’s “downtown cool-kid days” — to zhuzh it up. The result: an Instagrammable, millennial-pink ice-cream robot, splashed with Kulig’s iconic “Love Me” tag.
The dessert dispenser works much like your usual, boring office vending machine: You pay with a card, bill or coins and select your treat. But instead of granola bars and chips, you get to choose from three soft serve options: chili-vanilla, spiked with spicy-sweet Mike’s Hot Honey from Brooklyn; dairy-free dark chocolate or a twist of the two ($3 for a small, $5 for a medium and $7 for a large). Then come the toppings, including sprinkles, meringuelike yogurt chips, spicy honeycomb flakes and chocolate cookie crumbles (50 cents each). The machine gets to work, and after some whirring and clunking, spits out a cupful of soft serve and a plastic spoon.
“It’s such a showpiece,” Hall says, as the ice-cream slot lights up in celebration. Sweet!