Bar As Soda Fountain

Photo: Victor Prado/New York Magazine

Spiked Float
$13 at Burger & Barrel
It would be easy enough to corrupt a root-beer float with a shot of well whiskey and call it a day. But at Burger & Barrel, the Spiked Float has more urbane aspirations. Cane-sweetened Abita root beer supplies fizz to vanilla-bean-flecked scoops of homemade ice cream and a pour of Averna, a Sicilian citrus bitter that helps curtail the sweetness. 25 W. Houston St., nr. Mercer St.; 212-334-7320.



NYC Cream
$9 at Evelyn Drinkery
Whole sections of the menu at this Avenue C bar are devoted to canonical fizzy cocktails. Capped with a web of bubbly froth, the egg cream gets its comeuppance thanks to milk infused with cacao powder and espresso grinds, a few glugs of aged rum, and a squirt of Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup, all roiled with double-charged seltzer. 171 Ave. C,nr. 11th St.; no phone.



Fernet-Branca Ice Cream Sandwich
$6 at Pearl & Ash
Although not expressly potable, Richard Kuo’s Fernet-Branca frozen sandwich is an ingenious new context for the cultish Italian amaro. Kuo bookends a block of Fernet-­suffused ice cream (herbaceous and a hair shy of savory) with two planks of soft, perforated chocolate cake and serves the thing wrapped in wax paper. 220 Bowery, nr. Prince St.; 212-837-2370.


Bourbon Split
$13 at Peels
Barkeep Yana Volfson borrows from the Peels pastry kitchen for this boozy reimagining of a banana sundae. She gives bittersweet-chocolate ice cream a vigorous shake with muddled banana, Elijah Craig bourbon, and the intense Jamaica rum Myer’s, then decants the creamy drink, all tropical fruit and cocoa, over a pile of crushed ice. The final touch: a bouquet of fresh mint. 325 Bowery, at 2nd St.; 646-602-7015.

Cease & Desist
$15 at the NoMad
Leo Robitschek’s Cease & Desist is a cheeky twist on that food-court staple the Orange Julius. It appears on the mocktail list with freshly squeezed juice, heavy cream, and simple syrup, but he’ll happily shake it with a tropical measure of Flor de Cana white rum. The neo-Creamsicle is then strained into a highball glass prepped with club soda and fragrant orange-blossom water to give it a towering, ephemeral head. 1170 Broadway, at 28th St.; 212-796-1500.

Bar As Soda Fountain