According to a heat stress-induced Google search on a recent 87-degree day, there are more than 25 places to get good soft serve in Seattle. Making decisions even more difficult, many shops are doing their damnedest to put their distinctive, ahem, twist on the treat. 

Matcha Man in Georgetown is the go-to for build-your-own taiyaki cones. Fill the base of their freshly baked, fish-shaped sweet waffle with red bean paste, custard, or Nutella and top it off with your choice of soft serve from a revolving menu of flavors like black sesame, ube, matcha, pineapple Dole Whip, and Vietnamese coffee. Indian street food spot Spice Waala only offers one flavor at a time, but they make it count with flavor combos you won’t find elsewhere in Seattle, including pistachio cardamom, fennel, and rose. Cold Plate in the University District is known for Thai-style rolled ice cream, but bubble tea fans shouldn’t sleep on their “floateas,” aka BUBBLE TEA SOFT-SERVE FLOATS. And Indigo Cow in Wallingford is so dedicated to recreating traditional Japanese soft cream that they claim to SHIP THEIR MILK IN FROM HOKKAIDO, JAPAN. Their soft serve travels more than 4,300 miles to get in your mouth!

Now, we could go from shop to shop, tasting, testing, and comparing notes to find which soft serve is the best soft serve, but… why? Life doesn’t have to be about finding the best. Like so many of the world’s greatest foods, what’s “best” is in the tastebuds of the beholder and can easily shift depending on moods, weather, and cravings. With that in mind, some of The Stranger’s hungriest food experts sampled eight soft-serve spots across town to help you find your favorite for the summer—or just today.

Baiten

Capitol Hill

Baiten's Matcha Deluxe Sundae with matcha jelly, matcha custard, matcha rusk, matcha sauce, and "special matcha topping."

Baiten, a walk-up Japanese bakery tucked inside the Capitol Hill izakaya Tamari Bar, is so small and unassuming,you might miss it, which would be a minor tragedy. They specialize in jewellike fruit sandos and dreamy vanilla soft serve, which comes drizzled with your choice of sauce (including tangy yuzu curd, earthy matcha, and toasty hojicha) and crowned with a delicate glacier-blue meringue. My favorite has to be the Toki whisky-spiked caramel, which is just boozy enough that it’s reserved for those 21 and up. The slightly bitter bite of the whisky slices through the sweetness of the burnished copper caramel, which firms up into delightfully chewy ribbons where it makes contact with the cold ice cream—a divine dessert for anyone who craves simplicity. 

On the other hand, if you’re more of a maximalist, they also have plenty of elaborate, towering concoctions, like the kurogoma (black sesame) sundae, heaped with black sesame pudding, black sesame jelly, red bean paste, black sesame syrup, kinako mochi, a meringue, an ornate matcha cracker, and a couple matcha Pocky sticks. Whatever you choose, park yourself on one of the repurposed barrel seats outside and watch the world go by as you sink into bliss. JULIANNE BELL

Watson’s Counter 

Ballard

Did you know that Ballard’s best coffee shop and Korean fried chickery also has fantastic soft serve? In two delicious and often kinda weird flavors? In July, the flaves are boysenberry and Nutella, and previous editions have included jasmine and dark chocolate, lemon basil and blueberry, and ginger and rhubarb. Owner James Lim makes sure to choose the flavor pairs to compliment one another, so you can get them in a swirl without it being gross.

On the subject of soft serve, Lim has some emotions. At age 15, his first job was at Little Coney on Shilshole Bay, just around the corner from Watson’s, where he remembers making these gigantic, sloppy soft-serve cones with his friends. “This was the inspiration for our soft-serve program here at Watson’s,” Lim explains, lamenting that his modern machine isn’t built to allow him and his staff to make the cone as obnoxiously huge as they used to at Little Coney. You can get them in small, medium, and large, though, and the large is pretty damn large. MEG VAN HUYGEN

The Pastry Project

Pioneer Square

Before the Pastry Project opened their soft-serve window in late June, owners Emily Kim and Heather Hodge let me visit their Pioneer Square kitchen and give their dipped cones a go, fulfilling my 8-year-old-self’s dreams of one day working the dip cone counter at Dairy Queen. 

It is so much harder than it looks! It takes an expert hand to swirl their especially rich (borderline frozen custard) soft serve into a cone with such precision that it can then be turned upside down (!) and dunked into a warm liquid bath (!!) with nary a drop falling out of place. 

The Pastry Project’s soft-serve window is only open for the summer, and it offers three flavors—purple vanilla, chocolate, and twist. While the ice cream is decadent enough to enjoy on its own—no cheap, icy mix here—the true magic is in the toppings. The aforementioned hard shell dip is available in butterscotch, chocolate, and strawberry passionfruit, and you’re gonna definitely want to add their rainbow peanut crunch. That’s housemade honeycomb-esque peanut brittle that has been smashed to bits and mixed with chopped peanuts and rainbow sprinkles. Nut-Blasting Crispy Magic Rainbow Crunch Fuck Yeah is what they should call it. That on a twist cone with the strawberry passionfruit dip tastes like a PB&J turned up to 11. MEGAN SELING

Temple Pastries

Central District

Temple Pastries' new soft serve, in mango and pandan. JULIANNE BELL

I’ve long been a fan of the Central District bakery Temple Pastries, so I was thrilled to learn earlier this spring that they’d opened a walk-up window aptly called Ice Cream & Sandwich Window, serving two of my favorite food groups: soft serve and breakfast sandwiches. The under-the-radar spinoff doesn’t have much in the way of social media presence, making it a well-kept secret for those in the know. When I visited, there was a sign on the window notifying customers that sandwiches would not be available until further notice. But that’s okay, because we’re here for the ice cream. 

The cheerful takeout counter currently has two flavors on offer: a subtly floral light-green pandan and a sunny orange vegan mango sorbet with a frosty texture reminiscent of Dole Whip. I recommend getting both swirled together—the creamy, aromatic pandan and tart, fruity mango balance each other out beautifully. For toppings, choose from classic rainbow sprinkles, toasted coconut almond crunch, and, most adorably of all, a tiny Temple croissant. Note: There’s nowhere to sit, so you’ll just have to stand there and spoon ice cream into your mouth as you attract jealous glances from passersby. JULIANNE BELL

Tip Top: An Ice Cream Shop

Highland Park

Strawberry soft serve with hot fudge and honeycomb from Tip Top. MEGAN SELING

Tip Top: An Ice Cream Shop, tucked inside West Seattle’s very charming Highland Park Corner Store, makes “New Zealand-style ice cream with a Northwest twist.” What’s New Zealand-style ice cream? According to Tip Top owner and Seattleite Meaghan Haas, who attended the University of Auckland, New Zealand ice cream is made by blending together hard ice cream and frozen fruit in a soft-serve machine that looks like it came from the set of a Saw movie.

Your choice of a sweet cream or vegan coconut base is scooped into a large plastic cone and topped with frozen fruit—menu mainstays include blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, mango, and banana. Then the plastic cone is lifted up to a large drill that quickly smashes and swirls the ingredients together and squeezes them out like a Play-Doh Fun Factory. The result is as creamy and smooth as soft serve, but with a fresher, brighter fruit flavor. Not to get all Willy Wonka on you, but the strawberries taste like strawberries! 

The one drawback that isn’t really even a drawback so much as a kind of charming (albiet confusing) quirk: When my ice cream date ordered the mango ice cream, it tasted just like a burst of fresh mango, but the ice cream had a light pink tint from the marionberry order that came before it. Was it weird to eat pink mango ice cream? A little bit! But it was still very good. MEGAN SELING

Milk Drunk

Beacon Hill

Milk Drunk soft serve with peanut butter hard shell at Fruity Pebbles. (Sorry about the manicure.) MEGAN SELING

On Beacon Hill, Mediterranean fine-diner Homer is pretty well known for its soft serve, mostly because it seems kinda off-brand for a place with marble countertops and rockfish crudo to have soft serve. But neighborhood folks know—and now you do, too—that if you’re not in the market for fancy dinner, just ice cream, you can zip over to their sister restaurant, Milk Drunk, two blocks away. This fast-casual counter serves fried chicken sandos, curly fries, and even more soft serve, usually in different flaves than Homer. 

Like Homer, they tend to be inventive: Recent examples include fig leaf, Rainier cherry, Turkish coffee, and peach caramel turmeric. There’s always a vegan option and a dairy option, and they offer chocolate, peanut butter, or butterscotch hard shell options for your cup or cone, as well as plenty of sprinkly toppings. Portions are huge too—even a kid’s size is plenty for a medium adult. Make sure to order some curly fries and dip ‘em into your soft serve like you’re at Wendy’s. No, seriously. It’s good. MEG VAN HUYGEN

Frankie & Jo’s

Ballard

The banana split sundae at Frankie & Jo's in Ballard. It's vegan! MEGAN SELING

Big news for vegans and lactose-intolerant ice cream lovers! Frankie & Jo’s is once again serving plant-based soft serve at their Ballard location! Their Vanilla Sun Soft Serve, made with a cashew milk base, is only available June through September, and it stars in an array of sundaes, including strawberry shortcake, s’mores, baked cookie, and banana split. 

Did the soft serve taste plant-based to me, a dairy-loving vegetarian who earlier that very same day ate a cup of milk-based ice cream? Honestly, yes. But it was still so good! Not too sweet, slightly nutty, and the ideal creamy, cool companion to Frankie & Jo’s impressive selection of flavor-blasted toppings. Examples include strawberry beet compote, zucchini pound cake, roasty marshmallow, cashew butter fudge, sour cherry compote, and the intensely dark chaga hot fudge. MEGAN SELING

Hellenika Cultured Creamery

Pike Place Market

This is one of the most iconically Seattle food experiences that most people sail right past when they’re at the Market, and those people? Need to know. Hellenika serves the most astonishingly thick, luxurious gelato and frozen yogurt of anyone’s life out of their Pike Place shop. If you’ve had Ellenos yogurt before, then you get it. 

Greek Australian siblings Alex, Peter, and Constantinos Apostolopoulos started Hellenika in 2023. After running the Yogurt Shop in Adelaide, the sibs’ frozen yogurt was discovered by flight attendant Yvonne Klein, who joined forces with Alex and Con, as well as her husband, Bob Klein, to bring the stuff to Seattle as Ellenos Real Greek Yogurt in 2012. Peter went out and got a food science degree from WSU in the meantime, working in the lab on Cougar Gold cheese as a dairy scientist. When Ellenos moved out of their Pike Place digs in 2023, Hellenika opened up in the same space, by the so-called (fake) original Starbucks. 

Not only is this stuff as dense as mashed potatoes—not really—almost, though—it comes in cool flavors like macadamia, fairy bread, lemon curd, pistachio, and London Fog made with nearby MarketSpice’s Earl Grey tea. It’s zippier and tangier than Ellenos’s yogurt too, and it’s all made incredibly simply, with a base of milk, cream, and sugar that’s cooked and then incubated with Greek yogurt culture. The result is tart, ultra-creamy, and completely unique in Seattle’s ice creamscape. Get it. MEG VAN HUYGEN