At Unnecessary, Soft Serve Gets a Bar Tab

By Eric Barton
6:10 a.m. ET, July 3, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

There are cocktail bars that serve dessert, and then there is Unnecessary, the new Lower East Side soft serve shop from the team behind Double Chicken Please.

The shop opened at 66 Delancey Street, next door to the group’s acclaimed bar, and the idea is to take the logic of cocktails and turn it into ice cream. That means soft serve built around flavors more likely to show up on a drink menu than at a Mister Softee window.

Unnecessary Spiked Soft Serve New York City Spiked Soft Serve New York City

On the menu: The Dirty Martini folds olive, fennel, juniper, dry vermouth, and Grey Goose vodka into soft serve. The Garibaldi goes citrusy and bitter with orange, orange blossom, and Campari. The nonalcoholic flavors are built with the same cocktail-thinking logic: Dodo Green brings together Yakult, jasmine, and elderflower. The Matcha Grasshopper works fresh mint, white chocolate, coconut water, and Kettl matcha into something that sounds like it should arrive in a coupe glass.

Unnecessary Spiked Soft Serve Double Chicken Please New York City

Double Chicken Please partners GN Chan and Faye Chen co-founded Unnecessary with Frank Zheng. Double Chicken Please has become one of New York’s defining modern cocktail bars, known for a menu that treats drinks almost like composed dishes. The bar ranked No. 41 on The World’s 50 Best Bars 2025 list and No. 35 on North America’s 50 Best Bars 2026 list, and its reputation has been built on cocktails that pull from the kitchen as much as the back bar. Unnecessary takes that same impulse and sends it through the soft serve machine.

Unnecessary Spiked Soft Serve Double Chicken Please

The name does some of the explaining. Dessert is rarely necessary. Spiked soft serve from one of the city’s best cocktail teams isn’t going to change that. But it does make a convincing argument for treating an ice cream cone like one more round.