New in New York: Allow Yourself a Taste of Forbidden Fruit

By Mitch Broder

Forbidden Fruit was founded on two sound principles: Fruit belongs in chocolate, and chocolate belongs on fruit.

Except maybe in the cases of melons and grapes. But every principle gets resistance.

Forbidden Fruit is an all-chocolate-covered-fruit place, which makes it a good fit for the all-peculiar-place food court that is MacDougal Street. It’s a simple store with a simple selection that harbors the simple hope of conquering all the other food courts of the world, peculiar or not.

When you’re ready to help it succeed, prepare to “dip it!!!” or “drip it!!!” (With either choice, you get three exclamation points.) The dip-its are the individual fruits, which are coated with chocolate. The drip-its are the medleys of fruits, which are drizzled with chocolate.

The dip-its include strawberries, pineapples, bananas, and apples (in wedges). The drip-its include fruit sticks, fruit cups, berry boats, and clementines (in wedges). The chocolate comes in the customary white, milk, and dark. You can add coconut or walnuts. Or sprinkles, but just on bananas.

A manager gave me chocolate fruit. This was especially generous, since a clerk had already given me chocolate fruit. The manager gave me all dark chocolate, which is the correct kind. Everything was delicious. The bananas tasted like chocolate-covered banana ice cream.

So Forbidden Fruit has the product. Then again, so does Edible Arrangements. But Forbidden Fruit is different from that global fruit-bouquet chain. It has no Grand Confetti Fruit Cupcake or SpongeBob Bikini Bottom Bouquet. It has no fruit growing out of footballs. It’s not about arrangements. It’s about a snack.

The idea for the snack reportedly came from a fountain — specifically, the chocolate fountain at Dylan’s Candy Bar. Abbas Devji saw lots of people there waiting in line to dip things. He was uneasy with the public dipping. He envisioned fruit predipped.

He enlisted a creative director, Matthew Higginson, to create a store. Matthew led a six-month quest to develop the look and the menu. He dipped many fruits. He found that some of them didn’t agree with chocolate. Those included watermelon, cantaloupe, and grapes. They are the forbidden fruit.

Matthew wants to see Forbidden Fruits from Boston to L.A. Meanwhile, he’s planning  a Chocolate of the Month for New York City. And he’s just added a Fruit of the Season. The first one is the cherry, which, of course, has had a long and successful relationship with chocolate.

For now, though, the star fruit is the banana, which is convenient, since the banana is the symbol of Forbidden Fruit. You might not think it would work with a chocolate peel, but it does. As Matthew puts it: “You could cover a rock with chocolate and it would taste good.”

Take a dip at Forbidden Fruit, 106 MacDougal Street, between Third and Bleecker streets, in New York City.

New in New York: Catch Those Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls

By Mitch Broder

The groundhog’s at his Hamptons timeshare, but he has dispatched the Imperial Woodpecker to report the good news that there will be six more weeks of winter this summer.

This is startling, since the Imperial Woodpecker is supposed to be extinct. Then again, the groundhog is supposed to be 126.

Still, the woodpecker saw its bill, or whatever it is that it does, and predicted abundant snow in New York City through September 24^th. The snow will be saturated with flavored syrups, served in paper containers, and sold at the coincidentally named Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls.

Make no mistake: This is snow, not ice. A snow cone is ice; a sno-ball is snow. It comes from a sno-ball machine, in this case the SnoWizard sno-ball machine, which is made in New Orleans, which is the home of sno-balls. Ask the Bronx Zoo who predicts ice.

The machine is owned by Neesa Peterson, who is as warm as snow is cold, and whose store, correspondingly, feels like a little party. She makes sno-balls in forty-six flavors, and she will make them through the end of summer, which, she recognizes, does not fall on Labor Day weekend.

She makes a sno-ball by switching on the sno-ball machine, which shoots snow into the container that, with luck, she is holding at its spout. She adds flavor from one of the bottles of gaily colored syrup, along with a spoon and a straw, since you start with the spoon and finish with the straw.

Her flavors ($4 to $8) include Granny Smith Apple, Pink Bubblegum, Red Velvet Cake, and her favorite, Tiger Blood, which fortunately is strawberry-coconut. Her cream flavors (“Add $1”) include Almond Cream, Chocolate Cream, and her favorite, Sweet Lou’s Nectar Cream. Her grandfather was Sweet Lou.

There are also three toppings (“Add $1”): condensed milk, vanilla ice cream, and marshmallow cream. In the end, though, the flavors and toppings matter less than the sno. Whatever it happens to taste like, it’s fluffy and refreshing, which is why it’s been around for over seventy years.

The first sno-ball machine was reputedly made by Ernest Hansen in 1939 (though the SnoWizard company claims their guy made one in 1936). Before that, guys sold sno-balls from carts with snow they shaved by hand from ice blocks. Ernest found this unsanitary. Luckily, he was a machinist.

Also luckily, his wife, Mary, was a pretty good cook. So Ernest made his Sno-Bliz machine, and Mary made sno-ball syrups. They sold sno-balls under a tree, then moved into a store. The store, Hansen’s Sno-Bliz, still exists, along with a flurry of other New Orleans sno-ball stores.

Neesa is not the first to bring the sno-ball to New York City. In 1996, Mary Frey opened Guru Sno-Balls in the East Village. It was in an abandoned gas-station office on Lafayette Street. Guru was her Rottweiler. It’s not clear what he could predict.

Mary had roughly the same flavors — plus, in deference to Guru, Doggie Balls, which came in Chicken or Beefy. She moved on in a couple of years, but she left people wanting more. That’s good news for Neesa, who is also a  hit and who doesn’t seem likely to drift from her snow.

She came to New York a few years ago and worked at modeling agencies but discovered that her heart was in her New Orleans roots. She opened Imperial Woodpecker last year on Seventh Avenue South, but it was open just through August. This year she plays the full season.

In fact, she wants to open a year-round store, with warm stuff in winter. And she’s already marketing sno-ball stands for weddings and bar-mitzvahs.

She’ll be happy to tell you anything you want to know about sno-balls. But if you want to know why hers are Imperial Woodpecker, you’ll have to ask the bird.

Summer at Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls, 124 MacDougal Street, between West Third and Bleecker streets, in New York City.

New in New York: Sour Tastes Sweet at Treat Petite

By Mitch Broder

You walk along the boardwalk, then you step up to the counter, then you order some milk with bacteria and yeast.

That’s how you know it’s summer.

At least that’s one way, in the West Village, where you can approximate that experience at a new café by the enigmatic name of Treat Petite. Your treat is frozen kefir, which is just like frozen yogurt except that you can find frozen yogurt in a lot more places than you can find frozen kefir.

And actually, it’s not just like frozen yogurt, which is why Rovshan Danilov and Arthur Simonyan saw their entrepreneurial future in it. Kefir is tangy, which is to say piquant, which is to say sour, but in a good way. Freeze it and turn it into key lime pie, and you can startle even Mister Softee.

Kefir is popular in places like Arthur and Rovshan’s homelands of, respectively, Russia and Azerbaijan. It is indeed made by fermenting milk with bacteria and yeast, in kefir grains. It’s supposed to be good for digestion. And like most things, it’s made more acceptable to the American palate by the addition of fruity flavors, chocolatey bits, and mini marshmallows.

Arthur began handing me samples before I even stepped up to the counter, which you do on a floor that is indeed reminiscent of a boardwalk. He first gave me the Classic, which showcased the tanginess, or the piquancy, or the sourness, of kefir. It made me want more, which was something I didn’t need to worry about.

He gave me the pomegranate, which blended kefir tang with pomegranate tang. He gave me the caramelized pineapple and the strawberry-banana, which tasted like pineapples and strawberry-bananas. Then he gave me the Key Lime Pie — kefir with key-lime custard and graham-cracker dust — which proved that there’s a sound reason for this place to exist.

The Key Lime Pie is one of the Kefir Concoctions, which are combinations that further reveal the star ingredient’s versatility. It is an explosion of flavors, and exploding flavors are getting hard to come by. It induces you not only to keep spooning it but also to want to spoon the others.

The others include the PB&J, made of peanut-butter kefir and grape jelly, the Walnuts & Syrup, made of kefir and walnuts in maple syrup, and the Balsamic Strawbs & Cream, made of kefir, balsamic strawbs, and whipped cream. They’re “strawbs” because the menu blackboard’s too small.

I didn’t try any toppings besides the Key Lime graham dust, but there are a couple of dozen to add to your flavor explosion. Along with the conventional nuts, Gummy Bears, and Oreo crumbs, there are mango, kiwi, lychee, Cap’n Crunch, halvah, and Japanese rice cake.

The café has other delicacies, including crepes and waffles, but it is resolutely built on frozen kefir. That’s why the owners are wisely at work perfecting a chocolate frozen kefir. It’s tricky to balance chocolatey and tangy, Arthur explained: “We’re trying to find the best middle between those two.”

Miss Piper Miller with the S'mores Crepe.

Try a little something at Treat Petite, 61 Grove Street, at Seventh Avenue South, in New York City.