Eating Out the Town

Dive Into the Hits With Uncompromising Journalism

Content warning: Vivid and lascivious depictions of earth-shattering mouthgasms.

If you’ve spent any time in Manhattan this summer, you’ve seen them. Lines of teens and twenty-somethings in their Miu Miu shorts and GANNI hats filming their little videos on their oversized phones.

In a city filled with so many options, what could possibly cause people to cramp the already muggy streets? A Charlie XCX pop-up store? An exclusive in-person prop bet from Kalshi? These were the questions the Eating Out the Town editorial team were asking ourselves as we started on this case. And after a little digging, we came to a startling conclusion: frozen yogurt.

Yes, it’s 2011 again and every kid and their stay-at-home parent is pairing eyebrow-raising froyo flavors with toppings by the pound. To get the scoop (or shall I say pour) on this phenomenon, we dispatched the top beat in our bullpen for a special report reviewing all the top hits so we can answer once and for all:

1. Which (if any) froyo establishment deserves your time and money?
2. Is this fad worth the hype, or will it go the way of cronuts and oversized cupcakes?

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Butterfield

First on the list, our top beat went to Butterfield to try their famed peanut butter froyo—a flavor some of our older, more luddite editors did not know existed.

Flavors is where Butterfield soars. After just one taste of the Peanut Butter our reviewer fell victim to a fugue-like state and slurped up every last drop. If it weren’t for the audio device we surreptitiously planted on our reporter before we gave him a wad of cash and let him have at it. There would be no substantiation of our report at all. The chocolate was pretty good too.

Contrary to our expectations, the service was fast and the short line moved quickly. Butterfield is generous with their portions—which is not always the case in the froyo world—and put together a product worth the time and effort spent acquiring it. Their small but formidable lineup of toppings is enhanced by partnerships with Orwashers and Tate’s to provide exclusive cookie delights.

Verdict: Recommend

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Madison Fare

Order: Plain

Toppings: Rasperry coulis

Price: $9.80

Madison Fare only has one flavor, so if you don’t like it a little tart you shouldn’t come at all. Fortunately for our top beat, he does happen to like Plain and it was with no great displeasure that he wrote up the second establishment on our list.

What they lack in flavor options, they make up for with flavor depth/profile and spoon mobility. Each cup is crafted with care, so the line moves much more slowly. Before pouring in the goods, they coat the bottom of each cup with a special coulis (see photo exhibit above) that provides not just taste, but texture and a surprising amount of mouthfeel optimization.

Tastes like a sweeter Chobani.

Verdict: Rotund

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Mimi’s

Order: Cookies and Cream & Chocolate

Toppings: Cookie dough and pistachio sauce

Price: $14.98

At Mimi’s, the vibes are vibing and the social media aesthetic is giving everyyyyyyything and then some. Let me tell you, the viral Cookies and Cream✨ pairs with the Chocolate like Taylor with Travis. 💞💍

The self-served toppings are definitely dangerous—our reporter’s cookie dough and pistachio sauce was serving at checkout when the cashier wrung him up at nearly $15!

Did it live up to the steep price and hype? The flavor was creamy and smooth, but our top beat definitely left crumbs.

Comparable to 16 Handles.

Verdict: No (notes)

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Mythos

Quantifying the mean behind the magic is easy. Assuming frozen yogurt X can be represented as X_n, where base n sets standard plainness (i.e. n = Plain) such that ΔX = ± sucrose density¹ and toppings Y can be represented as Y_n such that ΔXY = ± flavor viscosity/viscidity² the case of the Mythos Plain & Mango Swirl we can plug and chug our two flavors into a taste-score reduction model³

where the permanent Plain flavor pairs well with the nice and smooth limited edition Mango⁴ and the deliciousness of the raspberry sauce pulls together all the aforementioned sweet and tangy undertones into one complete treat. Results: 5.33 pylons.

Mythos is known for their Plain, with non-Plain flavors rotating in and out. Like Madison Fair, they make up for their minimal selection with a full measure of sauces to choose from. You could do better. You could do worse.

We would of course add controls to our model for cost, business, and atmosphere if our top beat reporter managed to remember writing those details down.

Verdict: Null hypothesis (H₀) rejected

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Conclusions

I know what you’re thinking: A froyo review coming out in mid-September? How washed are these losers? I know we haven’t written in two months. I know. You probably hate me. I know. Maybe this whole blog is stupid. Stupid and dumb and fat… like me.

So is the froyo worth it? Yeah, whatever. Froyo is good. And in life you have to enjoy the good things. I’ve grown to like fads because it makes me feel like I’m a part of something. The naysayers will no doubt go on saying their nay: “Froyo may be good, but like all good things, Froyo also has the kernel of bad within it.”

But in this way all things are good, or have the potential for good, and all things are bad or have the potential for bad. As a society, if we want to get ourselves through this mess we’re in we need to celebrate the good, but we must not/cannot/will not succumb to the bad.

Fin.

1. Of course, we are working in base n to fit our models to the Toblernucci Equilibrium of Sweet/Savory Delights (which has been the editorial standard at Eating Out the Town since June 2026) in order to best accommodate the diverse range of processed-sweet and natural-sweet flavors represented across the diverse range of tastes and toppings our top beat ordered during the writing of this article. ↩︎
2. Where ±Y measures savory/sweetness such that ∞ is perfect sweetness and -∞ is perfect savoryness. ↩︎
3. And here we see the limitations of the Toblernucci Equilibrium of Sweet/Savory Delights, which was oft derided in the early-aughts as a stodgy academic tool to identify overall flavor composition and je ne sais quoi and thrown aside for the Harkness-Bakersfield Flavour Formula which became the de facto flavor measurer until around the social fervor of the early 2020’s when internet sleuths discovered the Harkness-Bakersfield Flavour Formula a plot from Mars Co. LLC developed through intricately hidden grants laundered through SWEETS, a public research center and policy think-tank jointly funded by the CIA, the United States State Department, and a handful of other wealthy but independent actors to bolster the prestige of Mars Co. LLC confections and chocolatey products and also provide some heft to the subliminal media warfare being waged against supposed “Third World” snacks and treats that were encroaching on domestic markets and Western economies as a whole. In what ultimately became a thinly-veiled and milk-and-toast attack on snack aisle products from developing nations, the now-famous “double-drag” of the Harkness-Barksfield Flavour Formula doubly penalized supposed inferior manufacturing/processing practices that cast undue doubt on non-Western melting, cooling, and packaging to buttress the scores of domestic sweet treats, which is no doubt why former beat reporter and recently exposed bigot Maximus Rex* preferred it in his review of Central Park Pastry-Thon which, due to our editorial style of only writing, editing, and publishing one article at a time, turned out to be an enormous time and energy sink and delayed Eating Out the Town’s publication cycle three articles by the time we decided to just axe the thing altogether. But what the Hakrness-Bakersfield Flavour Formula has that the Toblernucci Equilibrium of Sweet/Savory Delights lacks is a control for caloric intake. Thus the famed aphorism of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, the definitive architect of flavor arithmetic, still rings true: The scoring of sweets is as much a science as it is a mythos. ↩︎
4. By now this is almost certainly no longer available; thanks a lot Maximus. ↩︎

*Pseudonym provided for legal reasons