Travel News

The scoop on NYC’s Museum of Ice Cream

New Yorkers like ice-cream so much they’ve dedicated an entire museum to it for a month.

By Sarah Theeboom
The museum's rainbow sprinkles pool
New Yorkers like ice-cream so much they've dedicated an entire museum to it for a month.
The hottest ticket in New York right now is not a Broadway show or a concert. It's the Museum of Ice Cream, a pop-up exhibit in Manhattan's Meatpacking district running until 4 September. This is how much New Yorkers love frozen treats: a month's worth of $18 tickets sold out before the museum opened its doors. Since then counterfeit passes have reportedly been sold online, and the museum has released more tickets and an extended run date until 10 September in response to the public's insatiable appetite for ice-cream.
Four-stacked ice-cream
Scroll through the museum's Instagram feed (which already has nearly 30,000 followers) and you'll see why. The posts are of colourful ice-cream-inspired artwork, candy-hued confections, and a Willy Wonka-esque "rainbow sprinkles pool" filled with imitation hundreds and thousands. The wading pool is one of the many whimsical interactive exhibits at the museum, which include an ice-cream sandwich swing and scoop-shaped seesaw. There's also a collaborative attempt at building the world's largest sundae, where each museum visitor over the course of the month adds a scoop to a giant bowl. Visitors are warned off eating too much of the unusual ice-cream, however; it contains an enzyme that prevents it from melting.
Cone lights
Of course each guest receives an ice-cream cone or milkshake that they can safely eat, courtesy of a rotating pool of New York purveyors. They can also taste an edible helium balloon which would be the hit of any children's party; bite a hole anywhere in the sugar-based balloon and then suck out the gas for a squeaky-voiced thrill. Even more unusual are the tablets made of Synsepalum dulcificum, aka miracle fruit or miracle berry. A protein in the plant temporarily affects the palate, causing sour foods to taste sweet. One visitor reported that it made a lemon slice taste like lemonade. Perhaps the museum should hand those pills out to all the New Yorkers who tried and failed to get tickets, as a reminder of what to do when life gives you lemons.
Museum of Ice Cream, 100 Gansevoort St, New York, museumoficecream.com; open until 10 September.