Salt & Straw — a Danny Meyer-backed, Portland, Oregon-based national chain of quirky ice cream shops — launched its first Big Apple spot at 360 Amsterdam Ave. last month to breathless media excitement.
But the outfit’s weirder confections should have stayed in Portland, a city with possibly the nation’s most self-important culinary scene.
Some Salt & Straw “classics,” such as double-fold vanilla are fine, even at $21.20 for two double-scoop waffle cones.
The vanilla is lasciviously creamy, but the flavor is one-dimensional compared to the airier, rum-and-nutmeg-tinted Madagascar vanilla at Gelato Factory a block away on Broadway.
Salt & Straw is a long, airy Upper West Side storefront, as icy as a frozen food aisle decorated with a mural by Brooklyn-based artist Dan Funderburgh. Despite Eater.com’s warning to “get ready for long lines,” I saw no crowds on my three visits.
Salt & Straw specializes in the ice cream world’s obscure repertory — a pretentious style typified by the notorious Fernet Branca ice cream sandwich at the old Pearl & Ash. It tasted worse than the actual Italian digestif.
At least S&S’s creations are based on foods you enjoy in the real world.
But there was no joy in “pastrami on rye,” where butterscotch ice cream is packed with pastrami sourced from the Carnegie Deli. The only discernible flavor I detected was mustard. The meat crumbs “break down into powder,” my appalled colleague put it.
At least another New York-themed flavor, “pistachio ricotta cannoli,” had no savory overload to overwhelm the pleasant sweetness (these things are supposed to be desserts, after all).
But it’s a stunt: If I crave pistachio ricotta cannoli, I’ll find the real thing in an Italian bakery.
I loved sea salt with caramel ribbons on the “classic” list. This is what great ice cream once meant, an unchallenging indulgence in sweet flavor-and-texture interplay. The Guatemalan fleur de sel and hand-burned, dark caramel are partners in unpretentious pleasure that can’t be matched by laboratory stunts.
Whatever flavor you order, give them time to thaw for a few minutes. The varieties sold in pints or in scoops or cups were near-frozen-solid, a condition that blunts flavors good, bad and unspeakable.
The place hits bottom in this month’s special Halloween lineup. “Jack o’ Lantern pumpkin” is comparable to any Starbucks pumpkin latte.
But “Candytopia” lays down a minefield of Kit Kat, Reese’s, Heath Bar and Snickers fragments beneath a salted butterscotch ice cream that would be dandy on its own. The candies, some hard enough to damage a tooth, unsurprisingly all tasted alike.
And beware “Creepy Crawlies” at all costs. I don’t know whether the candied insect fragments under matcha ice cream were chocolate covered crickets or toffee brittle mealworms — but the happily deceased organisms felt like they were squirming on my tongue and throat.
I threw the whole thing away before I took time to investigate — and you probably will, too.